


Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

by dragonofdispair



Series: Hymns of the Guiding Hand [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Adorkable, Alien Culture, Alien Mythology/Religion, Alternate Universe, Arranged Courtship, Asexual Character, Awkward Romance, Canon What Canon?, Caste issues, Character of Faith, Class Differences, Class Issues, Coming of Age, Complicated Relationships, Festival of the Five., Gods, Gods Meddle in the Affairs of Mortals, Having Faith, Love Triangles, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing, Politics, Prophecy, Public Sex, Rare Pairings, Relationship(s), Sacred Sex, Sexual Content, Spark Sexual Interfacing, Tactile Sexual Interfacing, Teenage Rebellion, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-10-16
Packaged: 2018-04-19 19:02:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 28,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4757450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No-War, No-Factions AU. Festival of the Five: They were two stars circling a single gravitational point. One driven by faith, the other by desire. They came together only with the blessing of the Guiding Hand, and when they did all of Cybertron was caught in their orbit.</p><p>They weren’t destined for each other, but as Primus said: There is destiny, and then there is destiny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Festival of Primus

**Author's Note:**

> To the original instigators of this ‘verse: I went and inserted actual religious ritual, history, caste issues, gods, and a non-romance pairing into your smut’verse and didn’t even manage to write any decent smut to compensate you. I BLAME RIZOBACT. None of this is my fault. That’s all I have to say about it.

_He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement-seat_

_Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!_

          — Julia Ward Howe, _“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”_

_._

_._

Sunstorm competed for the gods’ favor to show his dedication; he had never conceived he might one day actually _win_ it. He was _not worthy_ of Primus’ favor and so he was unprepared for this moment. 

Every fifty-three vorns the five gods, Cybertron and his four moons, aligned perfectly in the sky, becoming for a single night a single tidal force, and under the eyes of all the gods become one the Festival of the Five and a contest to win the gods’ favor was held. Every fifty-three vorns it was a different contest, each associated with a different one of the gods. And Sunstorm had run every race, fought in the name of each of the Guiding Hand for centuries, ever since he’d been brought online. It was his way of worship. He was not the only one who entered a contest every time it came up, though he was the only one who had entered every fifty-three vorns. This Festival, Primus had shown him his favor and for the first time he or any watching could remember, a seeker had won the footrace dedicated to the Giver of Light and Life.

To Sunstorm the announcer’s voice was tinny, distant, incomprehensible, as he asked who, as the winner, he would choose as his bondmate.

The crowd was hushed, waiting for his choice. The stared at him. He looked back, meeting each of their optics. He was expected to choose someone, if only for the night. This was part of the ritual and he could not decline, but there was no room in his spark for any but the Guiding Hand. Yet Primus had seen fit to give him this moment and so there must be someone here for him. The aging priest that presided over the ceremony was there, armor fading around the edges, and spark bright with devotion to match Sunstorm’s own, and he would have chosen the priest in a sparkbeat, as would have been proper, but he was not the _right_ choice here and now. He looked into each pair of optics he could see, tried to look into their sparks, for the pair through which Primus looked back at him.

Gold, the very light of Primus, enveloped him. He took a step forward, then another. Quiet turned to complete silence. Would this warrior-caste _clone_ attempt to claim the _Prime_. Blaspheme.

But no, it was not to the Voice of the Ancients he knelt, but to the slender blue and white noble standing beside him. Still too far above Sunstorm’s station to ever be considered as a mate under any other circumstances. A noble so highly placed that he stood next to the Prime could any other day have killed Sunstorm for so much as looking at him, but he would not question Primus’ will.

“I have proven myself the worthiest of all the mortals who would come before you,” ritual words from a less secular time when the winner would choose a priest of the god whose contest he’d just won, who would then become an altar upon which the winner would worship the god; very uncommon in this day where the winner choosing his mate was more about romance than worship and the priest caste had been systematically decimated by the demands of Functionalist theory. Priests found their calling, in defiance of becoming an alt-mode determined cog in the machine, and so there were very few left. “Have I proven myself worthy of your favor, if only for one night?”

He lowered his optics, humble beneath the gaze of the god’s vessel. 

Primus may have looked back at Sunstorm through those optics, but the mech himself was confused. He knew the words, both of acceptance and rejection, from his studies of history, but this had not happened before in living memory. “I—“ He looked to another bot nearby, one with very similar optics but painted in pure silver. He was furious and made a sharp negatory gesture with his hand and the blue mech cringed. That was clear enough. He was to remain intact, the seal on his spark chamber untouched until he bonded to one of his own caste. 

Prime’s engine rumbled and he put his hand on the young noble’s shoulder. “Your creator has no say in this Mirage. Only what you want matters here.”

Mirage nodded and fidgeted under Prime’s knowing eyes, then turned back to the seeker still waiting for an answer. Still kneeling.

He’d always liked watching the seekers fly. Like jewels with wings and this one shone brighter than most, like he truly had a star in his chest rather than a spark. A long time ago he’d even dreamed of touching those wings. He’d been very young and very curious. What did they feel like? How flexible were they? Was it true a seeker could overload just from wing stimulation? But the demands of his caste and the gulf between himself and those flying gems had eventually crushed those dreams to dust.

Now, with Sunstorm having exercised the winner’s right to approach any of any caste — bridging that otherwise intraversable gap — and so perfectly still and patient in front of him — all those old dreams and questions came rushing back.

With a final defiant look to his creator, Mirage crouched to meet the kneeling seeker’s gaze. Gold shined out of gold, like the star in his chest had broken free to spill its light from the mech’s optics.

“For one night,” he answered ritual for ritual, “my favor is yours and yours alone.” And he leaned in as Sunstorm surged up and they caught each other in a scorching kiss.

And Primus looked on.

A tiny spark buzzed around Him excitedly. This one had been eager to explore but Primus had been holding it back.

There was destiny and there was destiny after all, and He was not above stacking the deck when he could.

This spark may be destined for a scandalous cross-caste romance that would shake the foundations of Functionalist society, but it wasn’t destined to return to him, its frame having failed in its grief. Not if Primus had anything to say about it.

He looked back to the couple on the racetrack. Sunstorm blazed so brightly as he held a writhing Mirage down and lavished all the worship he could on the one the god had chosen for him. Already they had connected their networking cables and were well on their way to overclocking each other into unconsciousness. Virgins, both of them, and they were going to bear sparks in public, in Primus’ Name, if they stayed conscious long enough.

Silently he sent them both the strength to do so, bolstering their reserves, before turning back to the eager spark.

“Now, that when you find him, he’ll be willing to try,” He said, “let’s get you to Vector Sigma, Hound.”

.

.

tbc


	2. Festival of Solomus part1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> … Rizobact? Why is there a second part to this? There was not *supposed* to be a second part to this. And now I’m writing chapter three. WHY THE PIT AM I CONTINUING THIS? And why is there actual, IDK, sorta-maybe-might be *romance* in my crack pairing religion-fic? There was not supposed to be actual romance for my crack pairing. Ever! 
> 
> I don’t know how, but somehow THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!

Mirage was mildly surprised when the seeker disappeared afterwards with a chaste kiss to his hand. Well, not disappeared. He went back to his unit and the rest of his trine and continued with his life after the festival. But he’d expected the seeker to stick around and try…something, he didn’t know what. For his part, Mirage couldn’t quite stop thinking of it. Other nobles gossiped, but it wasn’t really scandalous to sacrifice your virginity to the gods (just uncommon, with most contestants entering to win access to a desired bondmate), so when Mirage continued life as though his seals were intact rather than allowing himself to be seduced by others, they went onto other things.

His peers briefly remembered during the Festival of Mortilus fifty-three vorn later when Mirage made a special trip to Kaon to attend. But Sunstorm was defeated in the third round by a heavy and heaviily-armored miner-turned-gladiator by the name of Megatron and never made any attempt to approach his noble admirer. Without the fuel of another win and another public baring of sparks, the nobles of Iacon simply forgot, as they were wont to do.

All except his creator, of course, less because of the seeker himself and Mirage’s trip to maybe repeat the encounter, and more because that had been the first time Mirage had defied his will. The first, but not the last, and understandably, they fought over it.

And _Primus_ did they fight. The yelling couldn’t be heard from outside, of course, but within the borders of the manor… walls shook and scheduled activities such as lessons and meals were hastily rescheduled by servants who didn’t dare interrupt. And after, they retreated to their own corners of the manor, fortifying their territory — Phantasm to his office and Mirage to the private Praxan styled crystal garden-maze he called his — and the rest of the manor became a no-man’s land that literally crackled with hostility and drove away most visitors.

Right now they were fighting over Phantasm’s choice of potential bondmate for Mirage.

It wasn’t that Mirage objected to his creator beginning the process of arranging a bondmate for him. He was almost ten centuries old which was a proper time for a noble to begin entertaining suitors, even if the lower castes considered that age to be scandalously young to be tied to a single lover. Neither was it that he objected to Virtue from Stanix specifically. It was that Phantasm had arranged for his suitor to visit _during the Festival of Solomus_. It was an auspicious time for future-bondmates to meet, true, but Mirage had _plans_. His creator called his obsession with the seeker an inappropriate crush, but Sunstorm had been his first taste of freedom. The gods had favored them once; Mirage knew that as certain as Sunstorm did, the sparkmerge leaving the seeker’s own conviction of that specific point behind when it had ended. Their reasons might be different for maintaining that conclusion for a hundred and six vorn, but the seeker’s faith was unshakable. And now so too was Mirage’s. 

And if the gods had favored them once, they could do so again.

But not if Mirage wasn’t _there_ so when Phantasm had announced his plans for Virtue to visit they’d fought. His creator’s blatant attempt to keep him from going to Altihex to attend the Festival of Solomus was not going to happen.

Of course Phantasm was just as determined that the only creation he had or would be granted by Vector Sigma would not go and allow himself be defiled by that seeker again. It wasn’t proper. Once, as a spontaneous thing, maybe, and he could hardly have objected under the gaze of the Prime, but for his creation to _looking_ to have this affair. No.

The manor seethed with them and everyone within walked as though the lavish decorations hid landmines.

.

.

“Hey Sunny!”

The response was so automatic that Sunstorm had no need to even pause in his reading. “Don’t call me that. My name is Sun _storm_.” 

He allowed a flicker of the dangerous radiation for which he was named play over his plating and Hotlink backed off hastily. “Sure. No need to get your wires in a twist. Just came to deliver the good news.”

The gold seeker simply turned the page of his book — an actual plastic-and-metal _book_ rather than the datapads most preferred to use because datachips were easier and downloading the information directly was both faster and allowed a mech to skip learning to actually read and write more than was required for his caste and profession — and did not look up at his commanding officer. Hotlink was the leader of his trine, but they weren’t in public or on duty and Sunstorm was busy. “Starscream approved my request for leave.”

“Primus you’re creepy,” Hotlink sighed theatrically. “How’d you know?”

This time Sunstorm made an amused cough of exhaust from his engine-vents, but still didn’t take his eyes off the page of the Book. “Nothing mystical about that. Our dear _creator_ ,” sarcasm dripped from the words since _creator_ in this case was only a polite euphemism for _spark-seed donor_ , “is legally obligated to approve leave for the purpose of attending the Festival, unless Cybertron is in a state of war or I am in the midst of a disciplinary punishment.”

 _We are not currently at war_ and _I’ve been on my best behavior for the vorn before the Festival,_ _as usual_ were both self evident.

Besides, it would be hypocritical for Starscream to deny them the chance to enter the Festival Race, given what all the clones knew about their spark-donor’s reasons for entering the Race of Epistemus every two-hundred and sixty-five vorn. _Pining_ was too gentle a word for even the echoes they all had for the shuttle-scientist; Sunstorm could not even imagine how strong the desire of the spark they originated from was. He might fool the rest of the army into believing he only entered to prove himself the “best flyer on all of Cybertron”, but his own spark-clones knew better. Of course Starscream wasn’t above a bit of hypocrisy, but General Dai Atlas kept the seeker-commander well under control, and the truth was that since this vorn _wasn’t_ Epistemus’, Starscream just didn’t care enough to draw the Dai Atlas’ attention. Next convergence…well Sunstorm already had his appeal to the General drafted out.

Sunstorm entered the contests every Festival and recently he could _feel_ things gearing up for something. He didn’t know what was happening, but each time the moons and the sun and Cybertron all converged and the Guiding Hand became One as they had at the Beginning of Time it felt like the next _click_ of gears in a timer counting down to something catastrophic. For millions of vorn the gods had only watched but now they were once again guiding their children. There was no other way a seeker could have won a foot race, and he’d _seen_ Him looking out of the blue noble’s optics when he’d made his Choice. He’d felt it again when the miner had screamed but endured the stellar radiation that was Sunstorm’s namesake during Mortilus’. But the favor of the gods was fickle and the miner gotten cocky and arrogant and had been defeated in turn in the last round by a warframe named Strika whose commander had been interfering in her relationship with a squadron-mate. Mortilus favored Megatron, but it was not yet time. And just so, he could feel the gods' attention drawn to Starscream every time he took off to “consult” with Skyfire.

He said none of this to Hotlink. Instead he stayed silent, continuing to read. 

“Shouldn’t you be studying?” Hotlink, broke that silence like he always did. “I mean if you’re going to try competing with the all those scientist-caste geeks, you should probably be preparing for that.”

He turned the thin plastic flimsi, revealing the next set of tiny glyphs, each etched about a millimeter into the page and each smaller than scraplet’s micro-circuit resulting in thousands of neat columns. “I am.”

“Nuh-uh. I’ve seen the riddles from your previous attempts at this and they’re all like, geography and mathematics and stellar positioning not myths and legends. No way are the answers in that rusty thing.”

Both Hotlink and Bitstream may have been geniuses within their caste, but their breath of knowledge couldn’t compete with the likes of Shockwave or Skyfire. Not that either of them had ever felt the need to enter a Festival Contest. Both of them had taken after their spark-donor in matters of religion and were lucky enough to serve in the same trine as their desired bondmate. Sunstorm was the anomaly, not really smart enough to qualify for out-caste training like the rest of his trine, his alpha ability so blindingly different from the other clones’ (even the Rainmakers’ weren’t such a danger to themselves as Sunstorm’s could be), and a true believer and prophet which was rare outside the priesthood and thought truly impossible for a clone. People, even the other clones, looked at him oddly and he knew if they weren’t trine, Hotlink and Bitstream wouldn’t have anything to do with him; he was just too weird.

Sunstorm shrugged. “Because of Epistemus’ favoritism of airframes, Solomus’ Race has become the favorite of scientists, given that their knowledge does often give them an edge in solving the puzzles. But knowledge is not wisdom.”

He could practically feel his trinemate’s disbelieving look. Whatever Sunstorm hoped to find in that Book hadn’t helped him the last three times he’d entered this particular race. “Okay. Whatever. You wanna—?”

“No,” he interrupted.

Hotlink laughed. “How’d you know what I was going to say?”

“You _always_ end a conversation with me with an invitation to join you and Bitstream in the berth. My answer is always No. You know I am not interested in such things.”

“Yeah, but then you put on that _smokin’ hot_ show a century ago and me and Bitty thought it worth it to keep trying.”

Sunstorm just flicked his wings dismissively and continued reading. Despite his trinemates’ opinions that had not been a _show_ and certainly hadn’t been for their benefit. Eventually Hotlink wandered off to find his bondmate and spend their down time like most military mechs did.

.

.

tbc

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably mention that I’m using a milder prophet-of-the-gods version of Sunstorm who can control his radiation power instead of the strictly cannon I-am-the-LIVING-WILL-OF-PRIMUS version who can’t. Awesome as strictly cannon Sunstorm is, Mirage isn’t exactly radiation-proof.


	3. Festival of Solomus part2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Story related in this chapter is one I made up and not part of the cannon Guiding Hand religion. Not that there’s much cannon information about the religion, but apparently I'm abandoning all of it.
> 
> Gods, what is this i’m writing? Backstory? Prophecy? Worldbuilding? I was trying to write exposition on the caste system! It’s official: I have no idea where this story’s going. I really don’t…

His leave officially approved, extra energon packed, and his flight plan to Altihex filed with the officials of no less than four city-states Sunstorm had only one more task before he left on his long solo flight. 

The primary military compound of Vos had a perfectly adequate chapel dedicated to the Guiding Hand for ornly use, but for larger events and holidays a penitent needed to travel to the primary temple-spires in Vos itself.

The bright yellow and orange seeker landed lightly on the entrance balcony and made his way into the temple-proper. Solomus was not as popular a god in Vos as, say, Epistemus who had created the various airframes, from the generally science caste shuttles to the mostly labor caste cargo helicopters to the military seekers. After Knowledge Personified, Adaptus had the most followers among civilians and no military-caste mech ever failed to at least pay lip-service to Mortilus when it was appropriate for even an atheist to. So if Solomus’ House was less shiny or ostentatious than some of the other temples in Vos, it was not due to a lack of devotion on behalf of those few who were called into His service.

Crux, the youngest permanent priest who still happened to be several centuries older than Sunstorm, greeted him warmly. “Be welcome in the House of Wisdom Incarnate.”

“Wisdom is not found in a House, but in life,” Sunstorm answered, a ritual rejoinder that very few these vorn even knew. Crux had taught him when he’d realized his newly sparked visitor was not going to lose interest in favor of trick flying. He was the one who’d taught him to read and write as well, as well as any number of things that a military clone would never have been able to find on his own. The priest was a helicopter-alt, originally sparked for the medical caste, and still had the markings of a volunteer search and rescue medevac painted beneath his various symbols of priestly office. His wisdom, he’d confided in Sunstorm one very late night filled with enough lessons to exhaust them both, was in realizing that he had a spark meant to teach and only in the temples was there anything left to learn. Few and far between they might be, but in the temples they still had _students_ rather than just downloading everything that their caste “needed” to know. 

He’d never been willing to divulge why he’d come to Solomus in his search of students rather than Epistermus and Sunstorm had long ago stopped pressing him. There was a whisper of the divine there, old and faded beneath mortal contentment but it’s presence was answer enough to Sunstorm.

Crux was shorter than Sunstorm’s standard seeker frame, but he smiled down at his pupil anyway. “No need to ask what brings you here; it’s that time again. Of course you have my blessing.”

“I still have an orn before I need leave. I was hoping to visit the Pool first.” Yellow wings twitched slowly. “Life may well have granted me wisdom, but it is within the peace of the House that I best integrate it.”

The priest laughed. That wasn’t ritual, but uniquely Sunstorm. “Of course. It’s what the Pool is for. I’ll give you my blessing for the race before you leave.”

They chatted lightly as they made their way to the Pool. The temple was more crowded than it usually was, mechs who usually felt no need to visit Solomus’ House coming to pay homage for His upcoming festival. Still they managed to find a quiet spot for Sunstorm’s meditations. 

“Pool” was a misnomer. It actually was a volume of clear oil held in an anti-gravity field in the middle of the room. With no gravity the viscous liquid formed a single scintillating globe above their heads held together by surface tension. Sunstorm settled in, set his chronometer so he wouldn’t miss his departure time, then closed his optics and opened his Sight.

The Pool glowed with the light of the divine as it always did, and this close he allowed it to fill his entire Sight. He held no expectations of what he would See. Perhaps nothing, just the pure unending glow of the divine, and if that were the case he would still take the peace of this moment out with him, having cleared his thoughts before the race. But Solomus, along with Mortilus and Epistermus were the keepers of Fate and if this Festival like the last two was going to be another stepping stone toward whatever he could sense on the horizon then here and now was his best chance to see it.

That thought snagged his mind even as he tried to clear it of preconceptions and he allowed it. He could force his thoughts to silence, but Crux had taught him it was best to let his thoughts run their course. If absolute silence of thought was needed, then it would come, but sometimes they— _he_ already knew what the Guiding Hand had to say to him and his subconscious only needed the opportunity to speak.

So he thought of Solomus and Fate and how Primus had come to give over His custody of Fate to His fragments, long before Mortilus turned violent and agressive. Primus, the Life Giver, of course had held all of Fate when He spun each of them from the Well, but he was at his own Spark the _Life Giver_ and had grown so weary of spinning out both life and death for each of his creations that for a time he ceased. No sparks came forth new from the Well, no matter how deeply those first priests of Vector Sigma (who regarded the computer itself as a god) prayed for the joy of children. No sparks returned to the Well, even as bodies failed and they suffered and they prayed for release. Then Mortilus who’s duty it was to escort the sparks of the fallen to the Well came to his creator and asked why he’d had no one to guide lately.

Primus explained how he could no longer bear to take the lives He had given spark and Mortilus nodded gravely. This made sense to him and he let his creator be.

Epistermus came to Primus next. He knew with the certainty of Knowledge Personified what Primus’ actions was actually doing to Cybertron. But his logic failed to sway Primus. Eventually he too let his creator be.

Then Solomus came to him, and though Primus expected many great and varied arguments from this fragment, Wisdom said only, “They are suffering.” And Primus finally looked outside Himself to the people He had nurtured on His skin and saw that this was truth.

And so because He had come to realize the damage He in His weariness had wrought. And so He divided fate into three parts and gave them to these three of His fragments. To Mortilus He gave the moment of death. To Epistermus he gave the knowledge of each Spark from the moment it came to life in its shell until the time of its death. And to Solomus he gave the decision to pass a spark from one to the other, so that the exact moment of a mech’s death would always be chosen with wisdom.

This had worked for a time, but slowly the threads of fate became so tangled that the three found that even Epistermus, whose domain it was to know all, could unravel it. Primus had, but great as they were, they were fragments of Him. Part of this was Adaptus’ doing. The youngest fragment, had take up the mantle of slain Unicron and sown chaos in His efforts to promote flexibility and adaptability among mortals. With his interference the three fate keepers could not keep all the threads strait. For a time they tried to get him to stop, but Adaptus refused. “Change is part of life. And are we not each a part of the Life Giver?”

Solomus granted that this was wisdom and that to be the keepers of Fate, they too needed to accept change. He asked Adaptus how best to do this. “Adaptation isn’t just about individual capacity to change, but potential within a population to endure trial.” And then the youngest god took a new form and flitted off to cause further mischief.

The three fate keepers looked to one another, uncertain what, if anything they should take from that.

Finally it was again Solomus who gave voice to the truth. “Fate is too large for any of us to keep even the small parts we’ve each been assigned alone, but Primus would not have given us a task we were doomed to fail. Perhaps together though…”

And so it was that the three Fragments of Primus came to hold not only their individual tasks in the weaving of mechs’ fates but to hold the whole of Fate as a shared burden.

Sunstorm’s thoughts quieted and in the aftermath of reciting the story to himself the divine light of the Pool became his whole existence. It rippled in time with slight variations in the anti-gravity field, vibrated in time with every sound. Not that Sunstorm could hear those sounds any longer. There was only the coil of divine light at the heart of the Pool. The veil of the future remained opaque.

 _The future is not for the eyes of mortal mechs…_ the thought came and went in the emptiness of his thoughts and all he had in response was … _faith_.

 _Then what do you seek, Seeker…_ and this time he truly had no answer at all. He hadn’t come here for insight about whatever it was he could feel the gods arranging on the horizon, nor had he come for insight about the upcoming race itself, though both of these things were on his mind. He’d come here seeking nothing in particular but only knowing that it was important that he come and open himself to whatever, if anything, the gods felt it important to convey. Even if it was only the insight into his own spark that would be granted by the meditation.

There was a sense of scrutiny, then conference, then a new thought both his own and not as the others had been … _fear not_ … and it occurred to him to wonder what he could possibly be afraid of, for even death, even suffering, was all within the bounds of fate and part of the gods’ will… _faith_ … and then it was like dawn breaking while he flew so high it almost counted as a low orbit. A miracle of light that brought the world from shadow to Primus’ brilliance…and that always frightening drop, the moment of blind free-fall while he switched from sensors to sight before he righted himself and the world was more perfect for the momentary scare… _fear not_ …

… _This is not a thing to fear_ … and as his disorientation ended he realized that he had reached up towards the globe that still filled his entire vision. More significant, the globe had reached down toward him, wrapping a tendril of light around his arm and steadying him through the not-vision.

They hung there, a union of perfect clarity for a long moment…

…And his chronometer beeped that it was nearly time to leave. He opened his optics and found himself standing beneath the Pool exactly as he had been when he started. He was not reaching up. A tendril of the divine was not reaching down. 

Still disoriented from the transition back to the physical, he moved. Hydraulics protested, joints locked, energon pumped only sluggishly and he started to stumble, fall—

“Hold up, youngster. Not so fast.”

—was caught. He blinked and found himself clinging feebly to Crux, who was busy siphoning a small cube of medical grade energon into his secondary fuel port. “My thanks,” he tried to say, but his vocalizer had switched itself off at some point during the meditation and it came out, “ ** _kkkkrsht_** … _mmmmrrrxxx…_ ” and Crux chuckled softly and simply repeated. “Not so fast youngster. Your mind’s been elsewhere for most the orn. Give your body a breem to catch up.”

It was good advice and he did so, focusing on his HUD as the influx of energon slowly brought each system out of standby and he essentially performed a soft reboot. 

When each system was back online he tried moving again. This time his joints were still stiff but his body obeyed his commands. He got his feet under him and pulled away from Crux’s steadying embrace. “My thanks,” he repeated to the priest.

“It isn’t a problem. We don’t often see someone other than one of our own get that lost in the Pool, but it’s one of the reasons we keep the medical grade on hand. You good to fly?”

“I am,” he stretched his wings, tested his heel-thrusters. “I have a message to deliver, but first I must win the right. I can’t be late.”

Crux only nodded, as though that made perfect sense. Perhaps it did, to him; he was a fellow believer. “Then go.” He traced a trio of glyphs on each of Sunstorm’s wings with his finger, leaving no marks though his Sight could perceive them for several breems after he finished. “My blessing was yours the moment you landed on the threshold to ask for it, but go with it now.”

“My thanks again,” and with that he let himself out of the temple and transformed as he leapt from the balcony, blasting off towards Altihex.

.

.

tbc…

 


	4. Festival of Solomus part3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Story has a new summary. The old one just didn’t fit anymore.

Under the watchful optics of his creator, Mirage remained still and poised as they waited for their visitor. Phantasm was expecting some sort of misbehavior, it was clear. His creation had been _too_ well behaved for the aftermath of another fight, when a servant had timidly come to both their sanctuaries to tell them Virtue and his creator were at the gate. He’d been prepared to scold a seething bundle of adolescent angst into a semblance of proper behavior, not confronted by the ghost of an obedient creation he’d not had in a century. Even his EM field was smooth as unblemished crystal rather than its recent default of lashing out with resentment.

Phantasm was pleased with the change, but also suspicious.

A servant entered, announcing “His Lordship, Earl Virtus and his creation Lord Virtue,” and their visitors followed. Phantasm stood; Mirage had never sat.

“Welcome to our home, Your Excellency,” Phantasm bowed with every expression of courtesy. Mirage followed suit, silently, thankfully doing nothing that would embarrass his creator in front of their guests. “We have your suites prepared and energon nearly ready to serve.”

“Show us to our rooms,” Virtus spoke for them both, as Phantasm did for both himself and Mirage. “We will join you for your meal as soon as we’ve washed the stink of travel off our plating.”

“I can show you the way,” Mirage said quietly, speaking out of turn, but not in any way he could be reprimanded. Virtus simply nodded and Phantasm was forced to allow Mirage his minor rebellion.

The rooms were lovely, the best Phantasm as a mere Baron could furnish for his guests. Still, Virtus looked over everything critically before pronouncing it “adequate”. Mirage kept his optics and EM field blank throughout the inspection and pronouncement. He didn’t actually give a flying frag what the Earl thought about the rooms. They were the best their rank could afford, given their allotment of Iacon’s resources as it was calculated by the Office of Resource Management. Iacon's Council of Earls were always trying to pry a greater share for the nobility out of the merchant caste, but they were jealous of their duties.

Mirage supposed that’s why his creator had arranged this courtship. An alliance between his faction within the Iacon Council and the corresponding faction represented by the City Governor of Stanix…well it was perfect from a political standpoint. Uniting the Functionalist faction within their cities with a bonding between himself and the Earl’s heir would allow more pressure to be put on the Council of Dukes — the Senate — which translated to more pressure on the Prime who could pressure the Office of Resource Management. 

Apparently Sentinel Prime had grown reluctant to accede the concessions the Functionalist Party insisted on. He had been one of the Party’s staunchest supporters when he’d been chosen to succeed Guardian Prime and through the early vorns of his reign, resisting only when it came to curbing the liberties of the priest caste or altering the specifics of ancient religious ceremonies like the Festival. But in recent centuries it required more and more pressure to force the Prime to act in their favor. No one knew why, but Mirage and Virtue’s wasn’t the only political bonding being arranged for this purpose.

It was all very convoluted, but it made sense to Mirage, with just one teeny, tiny bug in the programming: Mirage didn’t care. 

Especially not right now. He hadn’t come up here to listen to Virtus verbally snipe at the details of the room he was dissatisfied with, but to assess Virtue. Nothing really encouraging there. Maybe he was wearing the mask of obedient creation just as Mirage was at the moment, or maybe he really was the little copy of his creator his name suggested he was.

That thought made Mirage’s fuel tanks sour. 

He stayed, playing the perfect host until Virtus dismissed him to tidy himself up for the meal then made his escape to his own rooms. Where he put a truly _monumental_ effort into not trashing his things; as it was he let his EM field lash out with every _bit_ of frustration he was feeling and ignored the fact that his servants drew straws to see which one of them would approach to give his plating the quick rinse-and-buff that was all they had time for before he had to meet the Earl for dinner.

His mask was firmly back in place by the time he joined his creator in the antechamber of the dining room.

The two creations were seated next to each other, supposedly so they could “get to know each other” but given that the conversation went in one audio and out the other without making an impact in between, with him contributing only enough to be polite, Mirage thought that was a useless gesture. Neither Phantasm nor Virtus cared if their creations “knew” each other before bonding. It was all politics. Just like the dinner conversation. Just politics. He kept the mask in place but inside Mirage felt like tearing his own plating off. There was more to life than politics. There was exploration and knowledge and love and adventure…There was risk, but also triumph.

Sunstorm had shown him how to fly. Metaphorically, only, but it was still something beyond the nobility in world in which he was trapped and he wanted, needed, more with the same intensity that he needed energon.

And more than that, he rarely agreed with his creator’s politics anymore. When he listened, which he rarely did now but when he did, he found Phantasm’s words to be shallow and petty, greedy and bigoted, and he wanted to tear his creators plating off as much as he wanted to rip at his own with the frustration.

So to avoid any embarrassing armor-ripping incidents, he mostly ignored everything that was being said. He was just listening for the conversation to turn away from politics and towards a perfect opportunity to interject, to begin putting the plan he’d come up with yesterday while sulking in motion. 

He was getting ready to pounce his creator and start tearing out wires for his self-centeredness and despairing hearing them talk about anything but how the merchants gave too much of Cybertron’s GNP to the scientist caste for medical research and equipment instead of assigning it to those who needed it most, namely them…he was beginning to think that he’d have to bring it up, but if he broached the topic they might suspect something was off…when:

“Well now that we’ve established that our creations will be a good match for each other,” Virtus said with a fond look towards Virtue, who seemed to be hanging onto every word, “we should discuss the courtship itself.”

Finally! Mirage could have jumped up and down waving his arms and singing his praises to Primus, but didn’t. “If His Lordship will forgive my presumption,” he interjected calmly instead, “I’ve taken the liberty of arranging to take Virtue to the Festival Race in Altihex.” Phantasm’s optics snapped to his only creation and narrowed in anger, but Mirage ignored him; he was talking to the Earl. “I’ve researched these bondings and it’s supposed to be auspicious for new couples to be present when the Prime gives his blessing to the Champion and his Choice.”

Oh he wasn’t fooling Phantasm at all. But the Earl’s presence kept him from exploding lest he embarrass himself. All he could do was hope Virtus vetoed this little outing.

No luck there. Virtus didn’t know Mirage’s personal agenda. “Of course, that sounds like a lovely idea. Perfect for a new couple.”

Mirage smiled, not letting even a hint of how he was practically vibrating show through. “I’ve of course made all the arrangements for the two of us. I can send you a copy of our itinerary first thing tomorrow?”

“Perfect,” Virtus turned back to Phantasm who’s polite expression looked a bit ragged around the edges for an instant before he controlled himself. “What did you think of this season’s crop of new laborers? Vector Sigma failed to produce enough sparks to allow for lower wages once again. Proteus informs me that he is currently drafting a bill that would allow for the production of clones for castes besides military. I’m certainly hoping you will…” Mirage tuned him out again. He had what he wanted.

After their meal he offered to walk their guests to their rooms again, warning Virtue that their shuttle would leave the next morning and offering to send a servant to wake him if he was not already up, then disappeared to the garden before his creator could come looking for him in his room. 

The gulf of caste between servants — most of them laborer, a few members of the lower-ranked technician subcaste of the science caste — and nobility — himself — was as wide here in his home as it was anywhere else on Cybertron. For all that their jobs put them into constant interaction with the nobles it was their job to serve, they rarely associated. If he was looking for companionship, he might as well have been searching the void of space.

Still, it may have taken Mirage the better part of a century, but he’d discovered some of the servants’ secrets. Like the gardening shed.

As befit such an unsightly necessity, the shed was hidden from outside view — so well hidden that all his life he’d not suspected it existed until he’d found it during the epic sulk following a fight with his creator. The shed itself was unremarkable, but it served a purpose for Mirage and that purpose was that Phantasm would never think to either look or send a servant to look for him here. It was debatable if Phantasm knew it was here at all since it, like most of the manor, predated his creation. 

It was a fitful recharge on the floor, but it was out of any potential acid rain.

He woke his servants early, before dawn’s light, to buff out the scratches caused by spending a night in the garden and sent one to wake Virtue with strict instructions that he wasn’t to wake either Virtus or Phantasm. He didn’t have to waste time packing; he’d packed his things yesterorn while he was throwing his snitfit and setting up his plan. Mirage apologized profusely to Virtue for the inconvenience but explained that this was the only shuttle to Altihex that had two seats open. Virtue complained bitterly about the early hour, but agreed that without his own creator’s connections, Mirage, the creation of a mere baron, had been limited. Mirage bristled at the condescending tone but didn’t comment. This courtship was going to be horrible, he could already tell.

It still couldn’t drown out the thrill of outwitting his creator and setting out for a minor adventure on his own. Mostly on his own. Maybe he could find a way to ditch Virtue later, at least for a while…

Dutifully, Mirage sent both their creators their itinerary. They wouldn’t be up to receive the messages for another two joors, he hoped.

.

.

.

tbc

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have ch 6 written but not ch 5. Why oh why does this story torture me?


	5. Festival of Solomus part4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Never mind. Just kidding. Apparently it was telling me it was chapter six when it really was just the later part of chapter five. Or muse thought I could actually write a whole chapter of Mirage and Virtue being snippy at each other…uh, yeah right.

The shuttle ride to Altihex wasn’t too bad, if only because they both used the time to catch up on their recharge. It was also uneventful, save for when Mirage was jolted from power save mode by an angry _blat!_ of his comm system three joor in. He listened to less than a breem of his creator’s angry ranting before muting the system and rolling over to get more sleep.

He woke again when the shuttle announced he would be landing at the Altihex airport soon. His systems spun up so fast it was a miracle he didn’t overclock his engine. As it was Mirage was practically vibrating by the time the shuttle’s wheels touched ground.

Everywhere he looked there were signs of the coming festival race. Decorations and lights, mechs stumbling around slightly drunkenly. More than that, there was an static in the air, a low-level ionization from so many excited mechs in a single city. Enforcers forced them to detour around one of the routes reserved for the Prime and Mirage couldn’t even bring himself to care. There was so much to _see_ and for the first time he was doing it without worry that his creator would notice and disapprove of his interest.

Virtue on the other hand just sniffed disdainfully at the inconvenience. Mirage had hoped that away from Virtus and Phantasm he’d take off the mask of being a copy of his creator and show _something_ , but it seemed that Mirage had no luck in the universe. Virtue’s EM field was a low-level charge of irritation at everything which flared to rigidly suppressed anger every time one of the celebrants stumbled too close to them. Oh yeah… this courtship was going to be horrible.

Fortunate they would only have this orn they’d have to put up with each other before the race; once they were back home Mirage could start trying to sabotage this courtship. 

.

.

The air was thick with excitement, a literally ionized atmosphere that ramped up everyone’s anticipation. It stank of electricity and magnesium, so thick that it threatened to spontaneously ignite. Most of it originated with the crowd, since most of the contestants tended towards calmer, more analytical sparks. But even they weren’t unaffected; Sunstorm’s weren’t the only set of wings or tires twitching or quite simply vibrating in place as the Prime took his place on the central podium to give his speech.

It was hard to focus on the Prime’s words; Sunstorm could see the thick tangle of divine Will that was the Matrix. It was thickest in his chest, where it rested next to his spark, but his every movement left an afterimage of omens. 

Sentinel Prime was tired, he could See in those omens. The burden of divinity was growing too heavy for his old spark to carry. There was not a single whisper of illness or frailty that anyone knew of; his frame was still strong and healthy even for one of their near-immortal race. It was his spark that suffered. It may yet be centuries before Mortilus came to return him to the Well, but Solomus had already chosen his moment, and finally Sunstorm could not bear to See it any longer. He looked away, already grieving for their lost Prime.

Fortunate for the seeker’s attention span and for the electrified crowd, Prime kept the speech short. “We’ve come, once again, to the convergence of the gods. In the Beginning, Primus was One and He became splintered in the great battle against Chaos. Today all the moons converge, aligning with Cybertron and our Sun and Primus is One again for a short time. We, shortsighted mortals, have chosen this time to celebrate each of Primus’ Fragments, to prove ourselves to each of them in their turns, and this vorn is the vorn we’ve chosen to dedicate to Solomus, Wisdom Incarnate.”

Prime leaned forward, now addressing the racers rather than the crowd. “Most of you have come believing you can solve the puzzles Solomus will place before you. You race to prove yourselves to your loves and your gods. Each of you has my blessing in this endeavor. And if there is only one piece of advice that Solomus would pass to you it is this: remember that Knowledge is not Wisdom.”

As the crowd and racers all erupted in cheers, a robust tank-alt painted in two-toned purple — the priest — stepped up to give the final blessing. The moons started moving into place, one — the one that was Solomus’ physical form, as Cybertron itself was Primus’ — slowly coming between Cybertron and the sun. Excitement built again.

“Racers to your marks!”

Unlike the other races, they didn’t crowd together at the starting line. Instead they were spread out across the stadium, far enough away from each other that if they were inclined to talk their way through the riddles they couldn’t be overheard. Over fifty scientists, a mix of car, tank and deep-space shuttle alts, and one military caste seeker, arranged neatly on the stadium floor.

This, the waiting, was only the first challenge. The anticipation made him want to fly, every instinct whispering _excitement-fly_ melding and merging with how the almost cordite-like scent generated by the crowd practically screamed _danger-fly-fight_. But this was a familiar challenge to him, one he faced with every race he entered. He held himself to the ground, even as his turbines spun, ignited, already bleeding heat into the air and only a single command from rocketing thrust as well. For the race of Espistermus, it was harder with the crowd and the turbines of sixty seekers adding to the noise and the scent and the EM fields of so many flight frames all resonating with _fly, fly, fly_. Hardest of all, regardless of which Festival it was was controlling the radiation that was his namesake. He could flare as bright as a star under these conditions, brilliant and destructive, but he held it in. Only a flicker of glow escaped his plating.

Finally the artillery-alt brought here for the purpose, fired his blank shell into the sky, signaling the start of the race. The massive _boom!_ of the shell firing was so familiar to his military processor that instinct and training and pure undiluted _reaction_ had him startling into flight before he’d even registered that his communications suite had successfully received the riddles he was supposed to be solving.

That first burst of excited _release_ expended, he brought himself down on a nearby rooftop and opened the message.

The Book had given him an answer that no atheist could anticipate. Something that could not be found in any science-caste research paper or calculated by any secondary hard drive dedicated to mathematics: there were five symbols, five patterns the race of Solomus followed each named for one of the gods. Each had eight points — the end goals of the riddles and the start/finishing point at the stadium — and were chosen randomly, but did not repeat until all five had been used. The last three times he’d entered this race he’d followed the scientists and flown the patterns of Primus, Solomus, and Espistermus, recognizing them only in hindsight. He’d been unable to solve the riddles for himself and so had lost the race to the scientist he’d followed from the air. He’d expected to use this observation to win his fifth race, when all but one of the patterns had been flown.

But this was not his fifth race of Solomus; it was his fourth. There were two patterns to choose from.

And he needed to solve at least one of the riddles to find out the scale of the pattern, the distance between each of the eight. 

Desperately he skimmed the riddles. They were as incomprehensibly arcane as they had been the first three times he’d done this. The first was a thirty-line mathematical equation. Experience told him the answer would be a seventeen-to-twenty digit planetary coordinate, but his processor did not have the capacity to solve that equation quickly. The second was a word problem with four different answers; the clue he’d get when he reached the first checkpoint would narrow them down, but that was useless for his purpose.

The timer counted down as he went over the riddles one by one, searching for one — _just one!_ — he was capable of solving. 

The sixth… the sixth was a light spectrum, dark lines marking the exact chemical composition of the substance burned to create the light, as unique as an individual’s spark scan.

Chemistry was no more Sunstorm’s strong suit than mathematics was, but _light_. His alpha ability was intimately tied to light and _that_ he knew with the same instinctive understanding as his own flight systems. More so even. And that spectrum… he looked around, the lights of Altihex shining in the shadow of the convergence… _There!_ The beacon on top of Tower Stargazer, over in the nobles’ housing quarter.

Immediately his navigation systems started plotting out the potential pathways, using the stadium as the starting point and the Tower as the sixth. He had his scale, his distance, but there were still two patterns to choose from. One was correct, a chance to match the speed of his thrusters against the speed of the scientists’ processors, and the other only another dismal failure. And there was no way to know which of the two it was; he’d have to guess. Frustration-fueled radiation lashed the empty air around him. He had a _message_. He _had to win this_.

A glint caught his optic. Something semi-metallic reflecting his flare.

A credit chit of the sort used by the merchant caste to trade resources back and forth. Empty and abandoned it lay on the rooftop beneath his turbines. How it got there he could not possibly guess. But something about it made Prime’s advice come back to him, the same words that he’d admonished Hotlink with while he studied the patterns: Knowledge is not wisdom. 

In a contest for the favor of the gods, could there ever be a better answer than faith?

The chit was dull and inert to his Sight. No divine guidance prompted him to pick it up and weigh it in his hands. He ran his fingers over it several times. On one side was the blank screen that had once displayed what it was worth. On the other was an etching of Altihex’s city crest. The gods watched as they did all the racers, but the chit remained only plain metal. It was his choice if he was to use it or not. 

Calmness settled into his spark. Faith was not about simply allowing himself to be led by the gods, moving only when he saw their influence, but also making his decisions and trusting his fate to their hands even when there was nothing to See. He tossed the credit chit and watched it flip over several times in the air.

It seemed to take an eternity, a vorn passing with each tiny revolution. He tracked it with targeting systems that could shoot a target the size of a glitchmouse while flying faster than the speed of sound and that certainly didn’t help speed it up. It followed its leisurely arc up, then down and he moved in slow motion to catch it.

It flipped one last time, flaring with the Will of the divine as it did so, before he caught it.

Had that been Solomus’ guidance or one of Adaptus’ tricks? He couldn’t tell. 

But if he doubted now he was back to where he’d started, debating uselessly over a choice he had no way of verifying before he was committed to it. He’d had faith when he’d decided to flip the chit; he would have faith now.

Smoothly he rose up into the air, transforming to his jet-mode as he did so, and accelerated. The gods had given him the chance to deliver his message; now he just had to win it. This vorn he would trace the pattern of Adaptus across the sky. A good omen for the beginning of the changes he’d Seen in the Pool. 

.

.

.

tbc

 

 


	6. Festival of Solomus part5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone (like me) who thought the eggheads’ race would be boring…My Skyfire-muse decided to put on a new paint scheme and prove otherwise.

Now, flying and racing properly, Sunstorm blazed across the sky like a shooting star. No amount of control could have kept his alpha ability fully restrained and he didn’t have the processing power to spare for anything but filtering out the most dangerous wavelengths anyway.

He set his targeting software to solving the puzzles as he flew. He didn’t want to devote too much attention from flying, but he also hoped that the coordinates combined with the clues would give him the answers so he wouldn’t have to search once he got there. Stopping to do a search pattern would ruin his chances. The software _blatted_ in protest at being repurposed, but set to its task.

That first equation was far beyond simple targeting though.

Fortunately the checkpoint was easy to find, set in the crossroad in front of a nondescript building whose only distinction was being at the proper coordinates.

He hurtled from the sky, passed within two meters of the flag and pulled up, already heading to the next destination.

He shunted the automated comm message strait to tactical and targeting software and focused on flying.

His HUD lit up with two notices. From tactical: he’d hit the checkpoint in thirty-third place. From targeting: based on his destination according to his nav systems, the tourist’s map of Altihex he’d been given when he entered the city’s airspace, his original four guesses and the new clue he’d been given, the next checkpoint was at the Harvest Moon, a high class engex bar.

Again, a sharp turn as he dove and pulled up and he was headed to the next checkpoint. Seventeenth place.

That one had been an incomprehensible collection of networked lines. The clue was that it was a map and added a number of engineering symbols to the image. His tactical database recognized some of the symbols and bombing software gave him the answer: a map of part of the city’s electrical system, with the checkpoint marked out over a small hospital. A targeting solution appeared on his HUD.

Empty ordinance brackets under his wings clicked open as he dove for the checkpoint. Ninth.

The next puzzle had been quite literally a puzzle. The new clue added color to the architectural lines, but it wasn’t until he saw the Altihex Deep Space Observatory ahead of him that his repurposed targeting systems made any headway. He abandoned the puzzle half finished as he swooped towards the flag. Still ninth.

The next was another word problem. Even with the new clue his programs only _blatted_ error messages. The statue — and the flag — were obvious from the air though. Seventh.

The next checkpoint was the puzzle he’d initially figured out — the light from the beacon on top of Tower Stargazer — and he ignored the list of nobles that had inhabited the Tower since it’d been built that was the new clue in favor of a new problem.

Tactical systems flashed a warning: there was someone on his tail. A mostly mauve and green shuttle alt had apparently decided the seeker knew where he was going. Follow Sunstorm, then use his powerful interstellar engines to overtake him on the last leg back to the stadium. Essentially what he’d tried his previous three Solomus races, except tracking a canny ground car from the air wasn’t as simple as following a fellow air-alt.

Sunstorm whipped around the Tower checkpoint — fifth — and ignored the warning from navigation informing him he was headed _away_ from his next destination. He needed to lose the shuttle first.

He accelerated, forcing his pursuer to nearly top speed to follow. The shuttle was probably faster than him, and definitely more fuel efficient, and could beat any seeker in any strait-line race. They were built for it.

But seekers were built for _dogfighting_. And just as significantly, seekers were optimized for _atmosphere_ , not for the near-vacuum of space.

He angled slightly up in preparation. Light flared out from his plating, brighter than any _but_ a shuttle, designed for the rigors of space, could stand. Dangerous gamma and x-ray radiation didn’t penetrate thick plating, but the unexpected nova scrambled his sensors and polarized his optics and he flinched. Sunstorm cut his primary thrusters and flared his landing jets, sending himself aft over nosecone. A moment of free fall, then he blasted his jets back to full power. A perfect Immelmann that even Starscream would have been proud of. Their belly armor nearly scraped as he passed the larger, less maneuverable shuttle. He was gone before the shuttle had recovered from the scrambled sensors and at this speed he’d have to circle most of the city before he could complete a one-eighty turn and follow or risk burning off his armor.

Losing the shuttle had taken time; Sunstorm didn’t slow but angled up above most of the civilian air traffic as he headed towards the Praxus embassy and the next checkpoint. A mid air crash would definitely ruin his day. He didn’t know anything about chemistry, but he could tell the diagrams were of something crystalline, not plastic or metallic. The new clue had only been an additional three diagrams added to the original one. But combined with the Embassy itself, that could only be the gardens and he passed two tank-alts too large to easily navigate the tangle of crystals without breaking them who were blocking the way so that the three cars behind them also couldn’t follow. It was an almost vertical dive to get in close enough to whip around the checkpoint and the g-forces of pulling up nearly ripped his wings apart. Structural integrity sent a cascade of errors across his HUD and he cleared them impatiently. It wasn’t combat damage, nor critical, so the alerts quieted obediently. Second place.

He couldn’t see who was still in front of him; someone who’d solved the riddles very fast. Sunstorm dismissed the thought and focussed on pouring on the speed for the final approach back to the stadium. Light in the optical and ultraviolet spectra climbed brighter as he focused more on his thrusters and less on his alpha ability.

He spotted his last competitor as he came over the stadium stands. The green and white car was nearly a racing alt, but he’d had to circle the building to enter from the same door he and the other ground alts had originally all exited from. Otherwise he would have surely been at the finish already.

Navigation and tactical screamed at him. Warnings flashed, yellow then red and his flight systems joined in, sending their own alerts. That was the ground and his approach was _too fast_. **_Lethally_** fast. He didn’t care. He adjusted his angle, spun and felt his wing cut the finishing ribbon. 

For one glorious, triumphant moment he thought he’d managed to do it without crashing. Then his wake wrapped the ribbon around his tail fin and brought his momentum to a painful, sudden halt.

.

.

.

tbc


	7. Festival of Solomus part6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So FHC_Lynn had a *fantastic* idea for writing interface scenes, so I actually managed to add a smidgen of smut to the giant smut’verse prompt. So… WARNING: graphic tactile interfacing, public sex, and sacred sex THIS CHAPTER. Possibly not well written, but that’s an entirely different warning.

“And we’re supposed to believe a military caste _clone_ solved puzzles designed to stump scientists!”

“What do you care?” another voice drawled. “You ain’t going to be declared winner if he did cheat and Wheeljack’s already said the seeker won fair and square as far as he’s concerned.”

Indignation flooded him. Did these mechs believe he _cheated_. He stirred, fighting his way to full consciousness. Light flickered weakly, plating glowed. Optic-visible spectrum only, for now.

“It’s for the priest to decide if there was any misconduct, not you,” a third voice added. “And you’re disturbing my patient, so if you would kindly _leave_.”

The voices quieted, but not before the first voice muttered “Military shouldn’t be allowed in a scientists’ race anyway,” and Sunstorm got as far as growling his powerful flight engines, dangerous wavelengths of light starting to flare over his plating, before the medic sent him back into unconsciousness. Stasis this time.

.

.

The second time he woke, it was to a distinct lack of muzziness, paired with a curious need for recharge. This indicated the medic had kept him in stasis until repairs were almost done, then woken him to allow his self-repair to finish while in recharge, instead of just applying pain blocks like most medics preferred. He saw the priest before his optics came on and he recognized the one from the race as soon as they did.

“Blessings of the Guiding Hand,” Sunstorm said when he was sure he had his vocalizer under control. Self repair sent a notice to his HUD indicating repairs were ninety-four percent complete and that he needed recharge to complete the remaining repairs. He resisted though.

The priest started in surprise, tank treads twitching, but recovered quickly. “Blessings.” He traced the glyph in the air, where it hung for a moment and only when Sunstorm’s optics refocused on him in the physical did he continue with a wry look. “The doctor thought you might be disoriented coming out of stasis. Do you know where you are and why?”

“Medical,” he answered. “Crashed. I’m always put into stasis for repairs. My alpha ability… I’m a danger to myself and others when I’m injured.” Or anytime his control wasn’t perfect.

“It’s good you realize it.” He paused. “I have no doubt you are favored but for us mere mortals I must ask: how did you solve a set of puzzles many scientists could not?”

The priest’s voice soothed the irritation. “Page seven hundred and ninety-seven, column fifty-nine,” the priest’s optics widened in recognition as he recited, “‘And so Prima realized the Names of gods were not for the optics or audios of mortal mechs…’”

“‘…And so beseeched his creator and in His compassion Primus chose Names for His Fragments so that his children by know all of Him.’ I see.” He chucked. “How did you know which name it was?”

“I didn’t. I flipped a chit to decide, but I didn’t know I’d chosen correctly until I hit the first checkpoint.” He could tell he was hitting his limit of consciousness; self repair was becoming more insistent on recharge by the klick.

That caused the priest to outright laugh. “Truly favored I see.” He reached out and took Sunstorm’s hand. “My name is Volley and I am honored to pronounce you this vorn's Champion. Prime will grant his blessing when you can stand again. Is there someone I should make sure is present?”

A polite way of asking who he was going to Chose.

“Mirage… Chimaera,” he murmured the formal name realizing the chosen name might not be specific enough, already slipping back into self-repair fueled unconsciousness. “If he deems me worthy for the night.”

.

.

Mirage had never been to Vos, so he certainly didn’t notice how much _nicer_ the temple of Solomus in Altihex was than the one in the city of flight. Altihex was the center of Cybertron’s deep space research and Epistemus was the undisputed ruler of mechs’ sparks here, but Solomus was a close second with his reminder that all research, especially that into the workings of stars and the ecosystems of alien planets, should always be tempered by wisdom and compassion. He didn’t even notice that it was a tad neglected in comparison to the one he was familiar with in Iacon, where the Prime’s residence ensured that the priesthood was well taken care of. All he really noticed was that he was _here_. Owing to his injuries, Sunstorm was going to make his choice here rather than in the arena as was usual; the crowd there had already dispersed into the surrounding city’s celebration.

Sunstorm was going announce his choice _here_ and Mirage (and Virtue, but that was an irritation not a perk) had been asked to _be here_. Mirage was almost vibrating with glee.

So no, he was in no state to criticize the architecture. Usually Mirage would have done his best to look around at the paintings and the carvings and the glyphs etched into the pillars and the floor plated in copper then polished so smooth it could have been glass or the crystal lights or the holographic sparklights or the great globe of oil suspended above the altar. But right now it could have been a dilapidated warehouse for all he cared. 

The seeker was already there when Mirage and Virtue entered, bright against the cooler blues and darker coppers of the temple. He gazed up at the globe of oil like it held all the answers to the universe. Others filed in around him: Prime’s entourage, several priests of all the faiths, other contestants including the second-place winner, a gaggle of nobles who fancied themselves the secular race officials, a couple of medics, a few others with the rank to insist they were present. The seeker seemed oblivious to all of them.

The priest who’d overseen the race stepped forward first. “First, because I’m aware it’s on _some people’s_ minds,” and he gave a wry, disdainful look to the secular officials, “I have investigated the matter the _false_ accusations that this vorn's Champion had somehow acquired his answers through less than legal means and found them to be completely and utterly erroneous. His success was through careful observation and diligent research of information available to _everyone_ should they search for it.” 

A discontented murmur ran through the crowd and Prime stepped forward. “If the priests are satisfied, I am. There is to be no argument on this point.”

Mirage looked to Sunstorm to see how he was taking having been under suspicion. The seeker was still looking up at the globe and didn’t even seem to notice that anyone was speaking.

And in fact the others turned to the seeker a moment later, expecting him to comment, but there was nothing and finally the priest stepped forward, murmured something Mirage couldn’t hear and touched his arm. He jerked in response, focusing on something else for the first time. He looked around, and Mirage noticed he avoided looking at the Prime, before looking into the priest’s optics. 

“It’s time,” the priest said.

Sunstorm’s optics swept the crowd again and he stepped towards Mirage.

“You…he can’t!” Virtue hissed. “He’s nothing but a _clone_.” Sunstorm didn’t even notice. “No. Mirage, you have to tell him no. You’re _mine_.”

Mirage whirled. “ _What!_ ” He didn’t even bother keeping his voice down. “You…pompous, small-minded, arrogant _glitch_. I don’t _belong_ to you. If we were _bonded_ I wouldn’t belong to you.” 

“We’re as good as bonded and I say you will not _touch_ this…creature,” and Virtue stalked towards Sunstorm, who had stopped to watch them argue, curious and disconnected. His expression didn’t change as the noble reached out to push Sunstorm away. The priest and Prime both moved to pull Virtue away…

… but they never got there. Sunstorm's plating flared with light, there and gone like a lightning strike and just as bright and Virtue fell away with a howl of pain. Not clutching his hands or optics as he would if Sunstorm had burned him, but clutching his audios.

The two medics rushed to the noble’s side. They pried his hands away to scan for any damage and Virtue howled in pain again. “I don’t see any damage…” one said and the other tutted. “Lets get him to medical anyway.”

Mirage looked back to the seeker still standing before him after Virtue and the medics and several of the angrier nobles had all been ushered out. Sunstorm had not yet knelt; he didn’t even seem to have noticed that someone had tried interfering. He simply watched with optics that seemed to look both at and through the noble. For his part he feigned nonchalance as he shrugged, not letting on just _how much_ he’d hoped for this to happen again. He tried for a nonchalant tone, though his spark quivered. “Well… now that you’ve driven off my intended, are you going to bond with me this time?”

The seeker’s voice was calm, if slightly disconnected, as though his attention was elsewhere. “There is no place in my spark for any but the Guiding Hand. You know this, Mirage.”

It was both a simple confirmation and a crushing despair. He knew. Sunstorm chose him because he’d seen something after that first victory that had marked Mirage as an embodiment of the gods; even the finely crafted frame of a noble held no interest for him otherwise. He was only mortal. But despair crushed him anyway. Sunstorm was a gateway into everything Mirage had found he had always wanted. Flight and freedom. Adventure and discovery and defiance of the chains his caste and creator had woven around him since he’d been sparked.

Besides, after this second encounter, seeking out the seeker’s touch and rejecting an Earl’s creation in the process, no one of his caste would ever dare ally with him, not spark to spark, again.

“Fear not, Mirage,” the seeker continued, all distraction gone and focused on the noble with frightening intensity. “No spark is destined to be alone. There is one out there for you. You will find him under the aegis of a new Prime, who will stand by your choice. He is every one of your desires, as you are every one of his. But everything you are, and everything he is will also conspire to keep you apart and it is only with the blessing of the gods that you will finally be able to reach out to him, spark to spark.” Sunstorm stepped closer, lowered his voice, his words now for Mirage alone. “And when you do, it will be the first pebble of an avalanche, the first raindrop of a hurricane,” he leaned in, a truly intimate whisper. “The first light of a new dawn, and you are its herald.” He closed the distance, breathing the last words on Mirage’s lips. A puff of air that was only barely a sound. “This is not a thing to fear.”

This kiss was everything their first, a century ago, had not been. It was slow and gentle, without sacrificing an ounce of passion. Reassuring. Comforting. And skilled.

Sunstorm’s message delivered, Mirage _became_ the Herald he’d seen and there was nothing for him to do except worship this one, the embodiment of the Will of the Gods.

The two of them were the same height, but Mirage, lacking weapon mounts, ammo bins and their attendant C.A.S.E. structures, heavy warframe armor, flight engines and the massive fuel tanks they required, was _much_ lighter. Sunstorm easily picked him up and whirled with him, the noble letting out an excited gasp, and pressed him against the altar. Their fans _burred_ together as the seeker straddled his Chosen’s hips. Distantly they heard the Prime belatedly uttering the Blessing for the Champion and his Chosen; neither cared.

“Beautiful,” Sunstorm murmured huskily, voice almost drown out by the combined sound of their fans. “Do you even know what I see when I look at you Mirage?” Mirage was beyond caring already, too busy writhing as the seeker stroked over sensitive seams and found a wide gap at the base of his wheel strut that made him shriek. “Herald,” he answered his own question in a reverent whisper. “Let me worship you? Am I worthy?”

Mirage shrieked, static building for his first overload. “If you stop now,” he managed growl when Sunstorm let up so that he could answer, “I will rip out your networking cords.”

The seeker laughed, a truly joyous sound and began lavishing kisses on every bit of blue and white plating he could reach. It had been a century but he remembered every part of Mirage’s frame. He remembered that the joints on his wheels struts could make him shriek, but the wheels themselves would only produce an interested hum. He remembered to lick the slats of the vents around his head, but also to back off and focus on the armor seams along his chest as he approached overload and the vents became _too_ sensitive.

And he remembered to adjust his grip, pulling them both fully onto the altar and pressing their pelvic armor together, to hold him down and hold him up as he spun up his heel-thrusters, intake vents on his thighs pulling air _through_ Mirage’s armor and wires and circuits around his chest and near his spark, then ankle-vents blowing air almost hot enough to melt armor over his legs. 

He shrieked. Overload ripped through him, electricity danced over his frame and arched to Sunstorm, then back, completing the circuit and dragging them both over that edge.

Metal _ticked_ as they cooled, a tangled slump of annealed armor and limbs. Sparks still leaped between them, even creating a solid line of tiny lightning where Sunstorm still petted his chest armor. “Beautiful,” he whispered again.

Mirage stirred, optics switching on dimly. “Frag.”

“Indeed.” Sunstorm licked his way up Mirage’s arm, sending shocks across every seam. “And we’re not done.” Busy with his lover’s shoulder joint, and the tiny gasps he was wringing from his vocalizer  he didn’t see the look of mischief cross his face, but he couldn’t miss it when it flickered into his EM field. “Mirage?”

The noble didn’t answer, he just locked his ankles around Sunstorm’s waist and awkwardly flipped them. The move lacked coordination, so it sent them both tumbling off the altar and onto the floor. Mirage crawled on top of the seeker to straddle him as their positions had been reversed a moment ago. “Certainly not done.” And he reached for the seeker’s wings.

.

.

.

tbc

 


	8. Interlude - Festivals of Epistemus, Adaptus and Primus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the first time, I’m not jumping directly into writing the lead-in to the detailed race. This Race of Adaptus needs a bit build up than the previous two Races I wrote. Vorns — centuries — of build up. Also, Prime’s kinda blend of the G1 and TFPrime ones…with lots of adjustment given he’s not a war-Prime here.

It had been a long and trying cycle of the gods.

After abandoning (and insulting!) his creator’s chosen Intended — a future Earl! — in favor of another night of being ravished on the altar of Solomus by a seeker who wouldn’t even bond, Phantasm was furious. He couldn’t _disown_ Mirage as such; the Functionalists’ own caste-laws meant he couldn’t change caste and his creator couldn’t adopt another not designed for the purpose of succeeding him. But he certainly was no longer welcome in their manor.

That didn’t stop them from snarling invectives at each other until the Enforcers were called to separate them.

He tried several times to have another frame sparked to replace Mirage, and was granted several attempts, but Vector Sigma categorically refused to do so. That left Phantasm without an heir and Mirage in the lowest position one of his caste could be regulated to: archivist. Not even criminal defense lawyer, but one of the library glitchmice tasked with keeping every byte of data generated by Cybertron organized and retrieving it whenever someone in either the noble or merchant castes needed it.

It was work. Work he’d never been expected to do before and he was slow to adjust. A new friend, his roommate Orion Pax helped him. Orion was so like himself that Mirage ached. He dreamed of adventure, of the Cybertron he was certain existed beyond the duties of his caste. He watched gladiatorial matches and talked about what it might be like. Working with him was a constant reminder of _why_ this, everything, was worth it.

Another reminder came in the form of the Festival of Epistemus, held in Vos this cycle, where Sunstorm proved himself the most suicidally reckless, though not the best if the words of his own commanding officer and spark donor could be believed, flyer on Cybertron.

“Am I still your Herald?” Mirage asked when the seeker came to over before the stands — the cheap seats — that were the only seats he and Orion had the resources for. The shuttle ride alone had almost beggared them.

He asked because his spark felt older, heavier. His youthful faith battered by hardship and loss. But Sunstorm had only held out his hand and hovered there. “More than ever.”

Mirage had taken Sunstorm’s hand and been pulled into the air. As was the tradition in Vos, they disappeared into the sky and stumbled out of a cliffside love nest sometime the next day. As it always had, the seeker’s faith bolstered his own.

By the next Festival of Adaptus, Sentinel Prime’s health had begun to fail. The ailment baffled his doctors and was eventually pronounced to be of a failing spark. No one knew when it would finally extinguish and it was a tired Prime with dulled armor that presided over a relatively lackluster Race of Adaptus.

Sentinel finally dimmed on the eve of the next Race of Primus and it was through a series of events so bizarre they could only have been divinely guided that the Matrix found its way to Orion.

 _Optimus_ stammered his way through the opening ceremonies of the Race and it was a strange mixture of grief and elation that reigned over the Festival.

And Mirage…

For a century and a half he’d been nothing more than a disgraced heir Vector Sigma refused to replace. Now he was the only one of his (official) rank who had the audio of an otherwise politically unconnected Prime. He was important to his peers again, and Phantasm actually approached him trying to make amends.

But he was also no more inclined to accept his creator’s policies and politics than he had been the orn the Enforcers had dragged them apart before they came to blows. Less so in fact. It wasn’t long before he received the first (presumably from his creator’s allies) threat and Optimus assigned him a guard.

It also wasn’t long before he was attending the parties again. At first he was thrilled because he’d enjoyed them when he’d been young, but then he realized just how much he’d fallen out of the habit of these things. They were tedious. His peers were small and petty and Mirage had no interest in gossip. He stayed long enough to shield Optimus from the cyber-piranhas, but the Prime was not expected to stay long and as soon as he was gone they closed in around Mirage, all wanting something. Favors, mostly, but also information, gossip, alliances, concessions or any number of things he wasn’t willing to give. At least he hadn’t yet seen Virtue at any of these things (rumor was that he’s recovered from his mysterious ailment, but refused to leave his creator’s manor), but sill... He at least tried to be subtle as he fled and retreated to an empty lover’s nook in the remotest part of the Primal Palace gardens to find relief.

His tranquility was broken when another said, “Excuse me, Your Grace.”

The title had been restored along with his status as Phantasm’s recognized heir, though since Vector Sigma had never granted him a replacement neither had ever truly been taken. Mirage had taken immense satisfaction in making his peers, and especially his creator, use it whenever possible, but hearing it from a laborer’s vocalizer brought him no pleasure.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, but,” the boxy green mech gestured to a slightly overgrown collection of crystals with the diamond saw he carried for pruning.

“No disturbance,” he replied, “I didn’t mean to interfere with your duties.” He made no move to leave though; the noise would keep his fellow nobles far away. Though as the boxy mech laid out his tools he did ask, “I was under the impression these gardens were always kept pruned.”

The mech stiffened. “If you wish to report my negligence —“

“Not at all,” Mirage interrupted, “I’m simply curious.” The rest of the nearby crystals were as immaculate as he would have expected; whatever this mech’s reason for putting off pruning that one patch, it was deliberate. Not negligence.

He felt himself being evaluated and resigned himself to being rebuffed. The gulf between castes always seemed so much larger than they should have been. Even as an archivist, the lowest of his own caste, few of other castes would speak to him except in an official capacity. More than law kept them separate from each other. Only the temples seemed to bridge those gaps. But the mech surprised him by finally gesturing him closer to the overgrown crystals and bidding him to look inside the tangle.

Five egg-shaped metallic pods rested in a nest of metallic scraps and non-mech built robotic manipulator arms and mircotools, all now inert save for the glow of energon and sparklight that shined through the thin outer plating of the pods. Cybercat forging pupa.

“They’ve adapted to scavenging our scraps,” the mech explained, “but they still need peace and quiet to forge and split-spark and these gardens are one of the few places in Iacon they can find it. I try and leave the nests undisturbed until the parent leaves whenever I can.”

Wonder, a familiar-strange thrill filled Mirage’s spark. A secret, and innocent secret like finding the shed in their gardens; a _discovery_. “As you should,” he murmured and humor bubbled in him when the mech’s EM field flushed with surprise and pleasure.

Just then one of the Prime’s guards peeked in, “You alright here, sir?”

Mirage recognized him. Escutcheon was currently assigned to his protection, though he avoided the bodyguard when he could. It irritated him enough when he finally found his charge again, hiding alone in some secluded corner of a garden or library or on top of a roof, but to find him in the company of a mech he hadn’t vetted… he brandished his axe-shield, engraved with the Prime’s seal, and Mirage remembered the words he’d heard over a century ago, when he’d been a different Mirage.

 _You will find him under the aegis of a new Prime_ …and he barked a laugh at how literal it was turning out to be.

Assuming this gardener was the one meant for him. Assuming he believed Sunstorm’s prophecy at all.

“We’re fine,” he sent Escutcheon away and turned back to the dull green mech. “I’m Mirage. Your name?”

“Hound, sir.”

“No ‘sir’. Just Mirage.” He turned back and gently touched the chrysalis. “And something tells me you know all these gardens’ secrets; willing to share a few?” _Willing to go on a small adventure with me?_

Hound considered for a very long moment, then shrugged. “Sure.”

.

.

tbc

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus: If anyone’s curious about the specifics of mecha-animal reproduction and ecology, Vector-Sigma sparks and clones, ancient Cybertronian history and mythology and how they’re all related, I’ll answer the first person who asks and subsequent questions from anyone in that thread. Because I’ve come up with the details, but none of them are really going to be relevant to the story, except the ones that are. Because gods.
> 
> [Edit] 12drakon asked the first question. Please ask future questions on these topics in that thread.


	9. Interlude 2: Festivals of Mortilus and Solomus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost there… normal pacing will resume soon…

Mirage took the opportunity to escape Iacon when the Festival of Mortilus next came. Optimus was required to go too, and once again he was in the viewer’s box next to the Prime, though the circumstances otherwise were entirely different. Optimus gently teased him about how he hoped that Sunstorm would win again — it was no secret, not after three Festival trysts — and Mirage teased him back about the crush he’d developed on that gladiator, Megatron.

Neither’s hopes played out. Sunstorm nearly crippled himself using his alpha ability to burn through Megatron’s armor, the gladiator so impervious to damage it nearly counted as an alpha ability itself, during the third round. Optimus had given him an odd look when he’d choked on his own fans as Sunstorm had saluted the gladiator and said, “You are the hurricane, Megatron, and it is not yet time. Too soon and the coming dawn will be only a triumph over ash.” Then he’d blazed as bright as the star he was named for; it had been painful to watch and not just because of the radiation. The seeker’s frame was so much lighter than the gladiator’s and Mirage knew that just one good hit and Mirage would have lost Sunstorm’s faith forever. As it was, he’d used so much energy that even with his ability which couldn’t ever be turned off, only suppressed, he’d been able to summon only a flicker during the fourth round and conceded to a lightweight ground car that looked like he’d fall over in a stiff breeze.

All in all it was less an escape than Mirage had hoped it would be, and when it was over it was back to being an Advisor to the Prime, back to being Phantasm’s estranged-but-acknowledged heir…

…Back to Hound.

It was _hard_ making sure he and Hound found the time to explore, to dance, to play and talk and eventually interface. It was perfect in every way when they were together, and eventually absolute agony when they weren’t. Which was more often than not. Their duties were so different and they rarely had the time. And Mirage was always the one who had to make plans; no matter how many times he assured his lover it was not the case, Hound was keenly aware that he was reaching above his station. They explored and hunted — Mirage had hunted turbofoxes before, but not like _this_ , tracking them so quietly and for no other purpose than to watch — and everything he could think of but only on Mirage’s terms terms.

Optimus approved, but none of Mirage’s other peers did. Especially not Phantasm. (Phantasm could kiss his skid plate.) The _nicest_ opinion most of them held of the relationship was that if he was going to have a _toy_ then he could have at least picked an attractive one. Mirage told them to get bent whenever it came up, and they shunned him…at least until they next needed him to ask a favor of Prime. 

Hound’s friends were no more enthused, and he was more reluctant to tell them where they could shove their negativity. _Their_ disapproval came from care of their friend. Mirage’s caste did not have the greatest reputation when it came to personal relationships with those they considered lower than them. Mirage hadn’t even _heard_ about some of the stories Trailbreaker and Conduit told Hound about how nasty nobles could be to laborers. 

Mirage had been appalled and horrified when Hound finally had told him why Trailbreaker seemed to hate his circuits. “I try Mirage, but he doesn’t see what you’re like, just that you’re noble.”

He swallowed his fury — not at Hound, not at Trailbreaker but at those unknown members of his own caste that had made this even an issue. One of many. “He can come to our next outing,” he offered, while anger churned in his tank, as gracious as he’d ever been with one of his creator’s guests, and with infinitely more reason in his opinion.

Trailbreaker was suspicious of the offer though. And he grew more suspicious as time went on and the promised outing never actually manifested. He and Hound, laborers, had a pretty regular schedule. They got one orn and two half-orns off work every decaorn, and it was extremely rare that something upset that schedule. Holidays mostly. There weren’t very many emergencies for a crystal tender and a surveyor. Hound had only cancelled a handful of times, ever, and all those times for personal or private emergencies.

Nobles on the other hand, especially Primal confidants, were never really off-duty.

It looked like they had a lot of free time, with the parties and the socializing, but in truth those events were not-optional. Mirage couldn’t just skip one of them to go clubbing with Hound no matter what Trailbreaker thought he should do. And an emergency… an emergency meeting, an emergency training session, an emergency inspection, an emergency business trip, an emergency natural disaster, an emergency council meeting, an emergency negotiation with an alien government, an emergency emotional breakdown, or even an emergency gossip session to bolster Optimus’ flagging morale… always hovered around the Prime, and consequently around Mirage.

When it came up again, in Stanix this time, he offered to take both Hound and Trailbreaker to the Festival of Solomus along with all the rest of the Primal entourage. 

Unfortunately Mirage and his relationship — if you could even call it that — with Sunstorm was hardly a secret. More like a public spectacle, and Trailbreaker had snarled that if he wanted to carry on with another while he and Hound were courting there was nothing he could do to _stop_ him, but the least he could do is not force Hound to be _present_. Hound had just politely declined, saying he didn’t want to be “in the way.”

For the first time Mirage seriously thought he might reject Sunstorm if he won. Then he felt horrible for the thought; what would that rejection _do_ to a mech who thought of him as a vessel for the gods? And he wasn’t even certain that rejecting him was what Mirage wanted.

It wasn’t even the interfacing, it was the way Sunstorm treated him while he did so. He wasn’t a noble, he wasn’t even _Mirage_ to the seeker, and he had no issues reaching across the divide of caste. To the seeker, spark sharing with Mirage was an expression of faith — faith Mirage sorely needed. But the fact was that interfacing, even spark sharing which he and Hound had yet to do, was part of that worship and that potentially was hurting his courtmate. He was so conflicted about it that he didn’t know what to feel when Sunstorm came in second — proving his win last cycle wasn’t a fluke, but still a hair too slow at solving whatever gave him the answers to beat Wheeljack a second time. Relief and disappointment seemed to have equal weight.

Optimus was no help. “I think you and Sunstorm are one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” he said in that tone of voice that Mirage recognized meant he wasn’t referring to anything he’d seen with his optics, “and I haven’t even really seen what’s between you, but you and Hound… What do _you_ feel?”

Eventually he’d found himself in the primary Temple of Solomus in Stanix looking at the altar and remembering another moment that had changed his life. Stupidly he’d done it without even a single thought towards the potential consequences. At the time he’d had no idea just how much rejecting Virtue would cost him, eventually change him, but he wouldn’t ever believe it wasn’t worth it. This time… he didn’t even know _what_ to do, much less what any potential consequences might be.

“If you’re looking for someplace quiet to think,” Mirage looked up into the optics of the priest, a dark glossy green mech with the frame of a heavy cargo ground-alt reminiscent of Prime’s, “we have a few rooms that aren’t strictly public for those in true need of the Temple, away from the revelers.”

“It’s alright,” Mirage answered, “right now the noise actually helps.” The priest cast a disbelieving glance towards the nearest group, a trine of helicopter-alts who’d been inspired by Wheeljack’s plea to his Chosen and confessed their love to each other and were busy loudly flaunting the usual rules of commonly decent behavior while they celebrated, and he clarified with a wry smile, “It puts me in the mindset of the last Festival of Solomus I attended and I feel the need to remember why the decision I made then was worth it.”

“Of course it’s none of my business if you don’t want to talk about it, but sometimes talking does help. Else the temples would stand empty, priests being here primarily to talk, after all. Issues with your bondmate?”

It was amazing that there was _someone_ who didn’t know about Mirage and Sunstorm, but maybe the priest was being oblique in order put the noble at ease. Or maybe he honestly didn’t recognize him. “No. I’ve been Chosen three times by the Champion, but not for a bonding. But in a way… issues with the mech that I _want_ to bond with.”

The priest beckoned and Mirage found himself led to a private corner he didn’t even suspect was there, and bid to sit on the bench there. “Say whatever it is you feel the need to say. Solomus listens.”

And so the whole story came tumbling out in an awkward heap of words that another Mirage would have been ashamed of. 

“It’s not my place to say,” the priest finally said after a moment of silence, “which of your two lovers is the right choice for you. But I do know, as do you for that matter,” he gestured to the revelers who wandered by, “there is a tradition for situations like this. Historically it’s been the lower-caste lover who’s raced to prove his devotion to god and lover, but they do not need to prove themselves to you, it sounds like, but you feel the need to prove yourself to them and their peers.”

A thrill went through his spark. _Could he —?_ “I couldn’t do that to Sunstorm.” Mirage said instead. 

“Then your choices are to race for your gardener’s affections, or to be always waiting for Sunstorm to win yours,” the priest said. “Which is more important? Faith or love.”

“Why do they have to be mutually exclusive,” Mirage grumbled. 

“They’re not,” the priest chuckled, “but lovers sometimes are.”

.

.

.

tbc

 


	10. Festival of Adaptus part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand skipping this cycle’s Race of Epistemus (Because really nothing of note happens there except a fairly young Skywarp wins by “cheating” with his newly stabilized alpha ability, confesses his undying love for his older trinemate Thundercracker, and Starscream tries to murder them both. He is not happy that his clones keep winning the Race given his alpha ability is literally to be the best flyer in existence. Dai Atlas stops him from killing anyone, of course, but the general couldn’t stop him from sulking for nearly a vorn strait afterwards.) lands us on the Festival of Adaptus. Also adding more elements to this continuity-soup: the description of the Matrix based on the one in Dark of the Moon, not either the one from either IDW or G1
> 
> Alternate chapter title: Wherein Hound Is Not Very Good at Subtext

To his shame, Hound’s first thought when he came home to see the formal plastic stationary adhered to his door was that Mirage had finally gotten tired of him and was using the most formal, rude method possible to announce he was cutting off the relationship. From the way Traibreaker, next to him, growled his engine that had been his thought too.

Mirage had tried teaching him read, but Hound had no aptitude for it and Mirage had always been willing to change activities when Hound got bored or frustrated.

On the off chance that the noble, knowing neither Hound nor Trailbreaker could properly read the glyphs, had included a datachip with a copy of the message he opened it as he let himself in their apartment. No luck. 

Trailbreaker growled again. “Little glitch could have at least given you a rejection you could understand.”

“I’m not sure it’s from Mirage,” Hound answered absently, “It doesn’t have his seal.” Seals were like a shorthand, an image or glyph that identified who the sender was. Why nobles needed both their own signatures and these seal things was one of the great mysteries of the caste in Hound’s opinion, but Mirage compared it to Hound’s own shorthand identifying-glyph. The one he used because he couldn’t actually write his full formal Vector Sigma given name, in situations where his serial number wasn’t appropriate. The various seals used by the various nobles was another thing Mirage had tried to teach him, but he’d not really learned. He knew a few though. Mirage’s was one, and — “I think its from the Prime.” — the Prime’s was one of the few others, but the seal wasn’t _quite_ right.

Trailbreaker just scoffed, disbelieving. Hound had to agree. The seal wasn’t right. Maybe someone was trying trick him by trying to imitate the Prime’s seal, not expecting Hound to recognize the difference? If so they chose a poor method; he couldn’t read it, and anyone he’d take it to to read for him would spot the fake.

Hound folded the plastic sheet and put it in his subspace. “No worries. Tomorrow’s my half-orn; I’ll just take it to the local Archive and have the librarian read it for me.”

“What about the concert?”

“It doesn’t start until late,” Hound assured, “and this won’t take that long. Just save me a seat.” For the first time though, he was glad that Mirage was stuck (his word, not Hound’s) in some formal noble’s dinner. That way Hound wasn’t going to have to embarrass himself calling to cancel meeting up before the concert in order to have someone else read a formal rejection notice that would mean the meet-up was canceled anyway, on the off chance that it _wasn’t_ a formal rejection and Mirage would be waiting for him.

True to his word, he went to the local Archive right after his shift of polishing crystals in the garden ended. Far from the main Archive of Iacon, this little sub-branch was more for the collection of data than its storage or distribution. And reading those few things that weren’t distributed as downloadable data was one of the archivist-on-duty’s primary jobs. This one was a spindly little blue and green bot whose alternate form Hound couldn’t guess.

“‘Sagacitas’” the archivist read, “I assume that’s you,” Hound nodded. “There’s also several sub-glyphs added to the designation: friendly, loving and muddy. Are those part of your designation or added by the writer?”

Honestly Hound didn’t know what a “sub-glyph” was or how to add one to a name. “The writer. What does that mean?”

“It means that the writer believes your name should be ‘friendly, lovable, keen or intelligent scent-tracker who rolls in the mud’. Literally, not metaphorically or socially in this case,” and Hound chuckled, because that _sounded_ like something Mirage would have said — or, well, _written_. Mirage had never been anything but careful to always address Hound by his unmodified, chosen name after the first time he’d been offended by the noble’s choice of pet name when they first started courting, but this was actually adorable. Muddy was just a plain fact. Whoever had written this had probably copied it from one of Mirage’s journals or notes or whatever nobles did to write out their contacts lists.

“Okay. What’s the rest say?”

The librarian nodded, adjusted his blue-tinted visor and continued. “‘Beloved spark of my spark-companion’ a formal way of describing your relationship to the writer,” he explained before Hound could ask, “meaning that you’ve never met personally, but he knows you through a close friend of his.” He continued reading without being prompted this time, “‘Beloved spark of my spark-companion, I would like to extend the invitation to you, and one companion of your choice, to accompany me to Praxus for this year’s Festival of Adaptus. Should you accept, I shall ensure all arrangements are made for you both.’ It’s signed and sealed by Optimus Prime. Quite an honor. I would not consider refusing, if I were you.”

Hound took the letter as the archivist handed it back. “Can’t be. I know the Prime’s seal, and that’s close but it’s not it.”

The archivist drew himself up, arrogant and snooty. “You’re probably familiar with the Prime’s professional seal. That’s his _personal_ seal. It means he wrote that letter _by hand_ and sent it to you,”

Okay. Wow. Not a fake, and not from Mirage. That changed things a bit. “Alright. You mind helping me draft a response?”

“Of course,” the spindly little bot sniffed and drew out a sheet and an etching pencil.

.

.

“What do you mean you accepted for both of us?” Trailbreaker hissed while they waited for the concert to start.

“Well I said that I’d have to check with you, and if you didn’t want to, I’d go alone,” Hound said. “It was a personal invitation from the _Prime_ , Trails. I can’t refuse that.”

“Why not?” The black mech grumbled and Hound just shot him an amused look. Trailbreaker knew very well why he couldn’t refuse the Prime.

Prime was the priest-king of all Cybertron, dating back to the time of Prima the First Prime. Nobles and merchants might rule the day-to-day workings of law and the economy, but ultimately everyone answered to the Prime. Without the Matrix, their species would die. Not immediately. They were a long-lived bunch, and cloning, like the military did, could artificially produce a second generation, but it was well known that you couldn’t make a clone of a clone, so there’d be no third without the Matrix to call forth new sparks from Vector Sigma. The absolute authority invested in him may have been a holdover from a much more superstitious time, but the fact was that despite thousands of vorn of chipping away at the Prime’s rulership, he retained almost all of it. 

When he’d been sparked, Cybertron’s religion had been in decline. No one Hound knew had believed in the gods. The Festival had just been a massive reason to take the mandatory free days off work, go out to get overcharged and confess your feelings to a current crush. But since Optimus’ Ascension to Prime… well after _that_ story had circulated, mechs stopped to listen whenever a priest told those old stories about the Matrix choosing the Prime not the other way around. And they didn’t even know the whole story. Everyone _knew_ that the Matrix had slipped from Sentinel Prime’s fingers as he died and it had fallen into Optimus’ reformatting him into Prime on the spot in front of hundreds or thousands of witnesses, but according to Mirage (who was there) it had been even more bizarre than that. The Matrix _had_ slipped, and the successor chosen by the Senate had failed to grab it, but then so had about a dozen other mechs as it (a diamond-shaped object with sharp edges and flat sides) rolled across the floor, down a flight of stairs and into an air vent. Where it had somehow travelled from the medical center in the Nobles’ Quarter to where Mirage and his companion had been buying energon to sip during the next orn’s race from one of the vendors, and dropped right onto Orion’s head.

There probably had only been about half as many witnesses to the reformatting as the stories said.

He also had heard Mirage’s frightened speculation that if it hadn’t been so public and they hadn’t needed Prime to announce the beginning of the Race in only a few joors, the nobles might have tried getting rid of both of them, but the timing protected him and after such a public debut he couldn’t be assassinated. There hadn’t been any attempts yet, but “It’s too soon,” Mirage had muttered pessimistically, “Another ‘mysteriously’ dead Prime so soon after Sentinel’s illness and people’ll wonder.” Especially given how obviously god-chosen this Prime was.

Hound still wasn’t much of a believer, but it was hard not to believe in that.

“It’s not right,” Trailbreaker muttered. “He’s just rubbing it in your faceplate that he’s got a sidepiece and you’re never going to be enough for him. You’d think after winning the Race for someone three times, even a noble’d accept a Bonding from a seeker, but he’s just stringing both of you along.”

“That’s not how Mirage tells it,” Hound said quietly. Hound wasn’t much of a religious person, but Mirage sure was. He went to a temple service once a decaorn and split his time evenly amongst all the gods, and before Trailbreaker had started harping on this point, he’d been willing to discuss his relationship with the seeker, Sunstorm, as a religious experience. To Hound’s audios it didn’t sound like much of a real relationship, even if there had been spark sharing involved, but it had also sounded vitally important to Mirage.

Then Trailbreaker had reacted so negatively to an invitation to go to the Festival of Solomus and Mirage had been reluctant to discuss Sunstorm ever again.

Trailbreaker just _harumphed_. He thought Hound was being unbearably naive. It’s possible he was, given he was pretty young still as that sort of thing was counted, but he didn’t think so and this was one of the few things they fought about. Fortunately, though, they couldn’t discuss this further and really start a fight because Jazz, Blaster and the rest of the band came on stage with a (literal) bang and the noise level in the concert hall skyrocketed.

.

.

“Did you know about it?” He asked Mirage the next time they were together. He’d managed not to say anything about the Festival for _joors_ while they crawled around the brush looking for an oil pool he and Trailbreaker had discovered the last time he’d accompanied his friend on a surveying trip. Mirage’s alt-mode was not very well suited for anything but smooth road so it had been slow going, but they’d gotten there and playing in it had been everything Hound imagined it could be. After they got back, Hound was helping buff out the scratches and touching up the places where Mirage’s paint had chipped and he’d blurted it out without meaning to.

Mirage’s engine purred as he looked up at Hound, almost in recharge. He _loved_ getting his paint redone in a way Hound really couldn’t understand but he liked doing it just to see that sleepy look of pleasure on his lover’s faceplate. “About what, Hound?”

“The Prime sent me and Trailbreaker an invitation to go with him to the Festival. I wasn’t sure I could refuse, so I didn’t. Did he do it because we didn’t go last time you invited us?”

The noble looked exasperated, and that huff of vents sounded angry, but affection for his friend suffused his EM field. “ _Prime_ did it because _Optimus_ is an interfering busybody old femme who loves sticking his helm-crest in everybody’s business. I swear, the thing he likes best about being Prime is that no one tells him to butt out anymore.” Affection was replaced by concern. “I can tell him to drop it, if you want. He can bully someone else into accompanying him.”

“No it’s fine.” He went back to his buffing, then paused again. “Aren’t _you_ going with him?” Mirage _always_ went to the Festival.

“Yes and no,” was his answer. “I’ll be on the shuttle with him, as usual, but I won’t be in the Prime’s viewing box this vorn. Which leaves him with a selection of a dozen of Cybertron’s most boring and self-interested members of my caste and in the interests of not dealing with the complications of another Dark Prime after he murders them all, I told him to pick someone else to sit with him. I believe he took it as a chance to finally meet you in a ‘less formal’ setting.” As if any meeting with the Prime could be anything but formal, especially with a dozen nobles nearby.

Hound laughed. Only Mirage could get away with making jokes like that about the Prime going Dark, but it was because he’d been Orion’s friend first. _Hound_ couldn’t imagine saying something like that, especially not when they finally had a god-chosen Prime again.

“So are you going?” Mirage pressed and Hound swore he could feel a flutter of nervousness in the plating beneath his brush. “Or should I tell him to get bent?”

“If it’s that important to Prime, I’ll go. Prime’s viewing box has the best seats in the house, right.”

“Right,” and that was a well hidden whisper of relief in the noble’s EM field, all out of proportion with just making sure his friend wasn’t bored and frustrated with the other nobles he’d be sitting with but he took it as evidence of just how important Optimus’s friendship was to him. “You really can’t buy better.”

.

.

.

tbc…

 


	11. Festival of Adaptus Part 2

Technically Mirage didn’t need to sneak around. Not only did he live here in a set of rooms on this very corridor, but he was the only one allowed strait into Prime’s office — or quarters — anytime of day or night no matter who he was with or what he was interrupting. Early after his Ascension, various administrators, merchants, organizers, guards and especially nobles had tried to bar a “mere” archivist that privilege, but a Prime’s command was absolute. But tonight he was slightly angry at Optimus and thought he deserved a good scare.

After the night he’d eluded Escutcheon in the garden and met Hound, Optimus had (almost literally) dragged him to the Temple of Mortilus for _training_ — “I’m not losing one of my only friends because you escaped your bodyguard at the wrong moment,” — and Mirage had agreed only if Optimus was right there taking combat lessons alongside him. Valkyrie, the priest, hadn’t questioned her new pupils. Training had started immediately and she’d pulled all manner of instructors out of who knew where on everything from basic hand to hand fighting to advanced lessons in resisting interrogation and counter-hacking.

To his surprise, Mirage had blitzed through the lessons so quickly the priest had announced she had nothing left to teach him within a century. Optimus still struggled, especially with situational awareness and reacting to threats and so — after Mirage had unknowingly spent an entire lesson on escaping and evading pursuit invisible, something he hadn’t known at the time he _could_ do — Valkyrie had tasked Mirage with improving his Prime’s reaction times.

This wasn’t the first time he’d snuck in. It got harder when the guards realized what he was doing and why, but even so he was rarely caught and that just highlighted why Prime needed this. There was always someone better out there.

He ghosted over to the berth and examined Orion’s huge reformatted form, deciding which wire or tube he’d pull to “kill” his friend tonight. The primary data cord in his neck was always a sure bet, but even invisible there was no way to disguise the shift of bedding as he climbed up to reach it. The primary energon tube next to his spark was also a sure “kill” but well protected behind heavy military grade armor. There were still weapons that could shred through even that, but he had none of them integrated.

The energon line in his left hip — he could reach it from where he stood and if the large mech didn’t bleed out quickly enough to, he’d still be disabled enough for a second “shot”. Fingers crept closer to the vulnerable gap.

The instant Mirage’s stealthy EM field mingled with Optimus’ recharging one, a massive hand reached down and grabbed his arm, whirling and sending him into a painful collision with the wall. The world stabilized with his arm twisted behind his back and Optimus’ weight holding him down. The dangerous hum of a vibro-ax ready to strike hovered near his audio.

Only then did Optimus’ optics switch on to see he was holding thin air. “Mirage?”

Mirage shimmered into view and Optimus let him go. “Your getting good at that. Soon I’m going to have to start ‘shooting’ you.”

The door opened, Ironhide and his massive cannon looking in to see what made that crash he’d heard. He saw Mirage and that Prime was in no danger, and closed the door again without comment. Good thing Ironhide was pretty discreet, else there’d be all sorts of torrid rumors about Prime and Mirage’s violent BDSM relationship by now. The regular rumors that inevitably sprung up around any mech of rank were bad enough.

Optimus just looked resigned. “What’d I do this time?” he asked when Ironhide was gone.

“Do I need a reason to test how you’d respond to an assassin?” The answer being _well enough to hold him off until his bodyguard responded, as long as the assassin went for a close-in kill_ , which was extremely good news. Optimus was a politically controversial Prime at odds with the majority of the noble caste and thus under threat, but he wasn’t a battle-leader.

“No, but you’re irritated with me,” Prime answered. “I can feel it in your field.”

It had always been impossible to lie to Orion even for one as well trained in the art as Mirage, and becoming Prime had only increased his sensitivity to others’ emotions and EM fluctuations. 

“I don’t appreciate your interference in my love life,” he said snootily to cover how tangled up in irritation and honest gratitude he was. 

“Really? And here I’d thought you’d appreciate not having to convince him without revealing why you wanted him there this vorn, when you were willing to drop it after just one invitation last time.” Glitch could feel Mirage’s gratitude too. And he’d hit exactly on why: Mirage _didn’t_ want to tell Hound just yet why he wouldn’t be sitting with Optimus this vorn. Sometimes he thought Hound might try and stop him, and he certainly didn’t want to take that risk. This wasn’t something Hound would ask of him, but something Mirage felt he had to do and he didn’t want anyone trying to talk him out of it. Maybe it wasn’t logical, but very little about entering a Race for a bondmate really was. Optimus respected that, but it did make the prospect of convincing Hound to go to Praxus with them a daunting one.

“Yes,” Mirage muttered. “But you’re still an interfering busybody who really, really sucks,” the low-caste insult rolled out of his vocalizer with an ease it had taken decades to acquire after being kicked out of Phantasm’s manor, and he felt Optimus’ EM field flush with fondness. Mirage could craft a beautifully cutting subtle insult with the best of his caste, so precise you only knew you were bleeding after he walked away, but he only used low-caste crassness with Optimus. “You suck. You suck the afterburners of a cone-headed seeker, such is the quality of your suckage.”

“Yes, of course.” Optimus hesitated; sometimes his next request triggered Mirage’s often prickly temper because of the issues with Trailbreaker and Hound, other times it helped them both recharge and reminded them of when they’d both just been archivists and sharing an apartment so small it was hard to avoid each others’ grieving, tired EM fields. Simpler times when togetherness had been a comfort, not a potential landmine. “Did you want to spend the night?”

Irritation prickled across Mirage’s field, but he didn’t snap at his Prime. Instead he just sighed. “Yeah, just let me buff out the scratches you gave me in that tussle. Wouldn’t want anyone,” by which he meant’ Trailbreaker, who seemed to make a hobby of collecting rumors about Mirage and retelling them in the most negative way to Hound; Optimus knew it but he didn’t call him on it, “thinking anything inappropriate.”

“I’ll help.”

Mirage gave him a grateful smile and he knew everything was going to be okay.

.

.

The introduction had gone smoothly enough. Hound and Trailbreaker had been quiet and nervous and as respectful as mechs who hadn’t been schooled since creation in the art of elaborate manners could be. Hound had even found the time to visit a temple of Primus and have one of the priests teach him the proper greetings. He stumbled halfway through the first one, when he’d looked up — and up! — into Prime’s optics and realized that that was a _demigod_ smiling gently back at him, but Prime had been pleased with the attempt. And then had done his best to tackleglomp both his guests almost squishing them with a bulk he still forgot he had and the awkwardness had disappeared in a puff of embarrassed chuckles.

In hindsight though, the shuttle ride to Praxus _could_ have gone better. Between Senator Proteus’ genteel insinuations about Mirage’s sordid relationships with “various” lesser creatures and Trailbreaker’s aggressive defensiveness Optimus had eventually had to exercise his Primal authority to send them to separate corners of the shuttle, who’d laughed silently, EM fluctuating in unmistakable mirth, at his high-caste passengers being treated like errant newsparks. Mirage had muttered _almost_ quietly to Hound a comment about muzzling them both to stop their incessant barking and Hound had laughed, but not without a guilty look towards Trailbreaker. The comment _had_ shut up the rest of the Prime’s entourage and the nobles had restricted themselves to dirty looks lest the Prime take his advisor’s suggestion and have them all leashed.

Trailbreaker glared when the sleeping arrangements had revealed that Mirage would be sharing with Prime, but Hound had been mollified by the rotation bodyguards who’d also be sharing the room. Besides he was sharing with Trailbreaker, because they were roommates in Iacon, which would have meant five or six of them (the three of them and Mirage’s bodyguards) stuffed into a room only really big enough for two. And Mirage and Trailbreaker couldn’t switch; there was still the space issue and a stranger couldn’t be allowed to recharge in the same room as a vulnerable Prime, and sharing with Prime let more of the bodyguards have a full recharge cycle to prepare for the crowds and ceremonies they’d have to be wary of the next day. It just didn’t logistically work, however Trailbreaker protested.

By morning, Mirage was gone. Hound had been slightly disappointed, but he’d been ambushed by Prime’s personal detailer (Trailbreaker was in there now, trying to fend off the pushy femme in defense of his stains and scratches…and losing, while Hound had snuck out after a basic buff and matte polish; honestly he’d stopped being unreasonable about getting clean after a vorn of courting Mirage and just said it was just an opportunity to get dirty again which never failed to spark a laugh) which made meant it was later by the time he left his temporary quarters to find his lover, and he’d been warned Mirage wouldn’t be there to watch the race.

“He left a message for you,” Prime said when the gruff red bodyguard let him in when he went looking for Mirage, and he passed over the tiny datachip.

The message was short, but thoughtful. _Whatever happens, remember that I love you — Chimaera._ Mirage’s full formal name, the one given to him by Vector Sigma when he’d been sparked, as _Sagacitas_ was Hound’s.

“Thanks,” he said awkwardly to the Prime. He resisted asking why Mirage wasn’t here, why he was leaving the Prime to attend the Race without him. Whatever it was, if Mirage had wanted him to know he would have said and it must have been really important. He felt like he knew Mirage pretty well and he was sure that nothing was more important in the blue mech’s mind than being Prime’s friend. Besides it was likely this had all been arranged so that they _had_ to come to the Festival and Mirage would actually join them later.

“It was no trouble at all, Hound. Truly.” Prime waved away the thanks. “Now… we have about a joor before we need to be at the stadium — a joor which I refuse to spend with the stick-afts I have to spend all orn with back in Iacon. I’m told you like wild crystal gardens, and Praxus has the largest track of land set aside for wild crystals on Cybertron. Does that sound like a good way to spend a joor?”

“Sure,” he looked down embarrassed that he’d forgotten his manners, “I mean. Yes. Whatever you want, Lord Prime.”

“None of that,” Prime admonished. “Not from you.”

.

.

They didn’t stay at the Garden the whole joor. Neither did they really explore it as thoroughly as either Hound or Trailbreaker might have liked; Prime was required to keep his paint nice for the upcoming ceremony, something that Hound was used to after similar things with Mirage. Most of the time Mirage was willing to get a bit scratched and dirty, but occasionally when he wouldn’t have time to clean up afterwards they would have to be careful. Not to mention their own paint. He and Trailbreaker had to look nice too. Even if they weren’t part of the ceremony, they were going to be in the viewing box with _Prime_ in front of _cameras_. They couldn’t mess up their own paint. They had neither the time nor desire to be ambushed again.

Trailbreaker started the outing seeming willing to find fault in anything Prime did, but with what Mirage had called “the most boring and self-interested members of the noble caste” absent it was hard not to like the Prime in person. He didn’t talk down to them and seemed genuinely interested in what they had to say about the garden. Trailbreaker talked about why this area had been chosen for the Praxans’ wild space — his surveyor’s programming pointing out how it was too unstable to support the soaring towers that Praxans preferred — and Hound made observations about the ecosystem. 

He even admitted to sheltering the cybercat nests when he could, to his great chagrin, but the Prime had just been so _interested_ that it had seemed so reasonable.

Though, he reflected as Prime waved off his stuttered apology, it was likely he’d already known about that through Mirage.

Eventually they ended up on the balcony of a local refueling shop so small it had only the single mech running it. 

The roar of approaching seeker engines drew his attention away from the conversation (still about mechanical ecosystems) to the newcomer, who drew himself up, transformed and landed on the other side of the balcony where he was accosted by the bodyguards. He waited patiently while Ironhide growled and blustered and searched him for weapons, which he had a military-caste seeker’s standard allotment but obediently allowed the ammunition and power capacitors to be detached and he subspaced them (not confiscated, but harmless there), but didn’t take his gaze off Prime and Hound.

Optimus finally told the bodyguard to stand down and allow the seeker to approach. As he did so, Hound couldn’t help but drink in the sight. Everything about him seemed graceful and perfect, gleaming paint in shades of gold almost liquid smooth on his frame, and Hound just felt boxy in comparison. Really, even if the’d thought the interfacing was all there to it, he wouldn’t blame Mirage for wanting a seeker like Sunstorm. 

He approached Prime first, as was right, and knelt. 

“You shouldn’t,” Optimus sounded truly distressed. “Stand up.” The seeker did so and Prime squirmed under that gaze. “What is it?”

“Everyone fails at some point in their functioning,” the seeker said, with authority. “You wouldn’t have been chosen if you could fail at what matters most. You’re not capable of it.”

Prime straightened, “Wha—?” but the seeker had already shifted his attention to Hound.

The gold seeker’s gaze was disturbing. He didn’t _quite_ focus on him, seemed to look at and through him, and right about the time Hound would have snapped for him to explain himself he simply nodded and took off, heel-thrusters igniting and carrying him in the air. 

“Sir,” Ironhide interjected, “should I have Silverbolt intercept?”

“No…” Prime said, “let him go.” 

.

.

tbc

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone interested in some headcannon about the temples and priesthood of Mortilus? Or about Adaptus’ relationship with the three Fates of his pantheon in Cybertronian myth? Or alpha abilities and how relate to the gods? First person who asks starts the thread, but I’ll take questions from anyone.
> 
> [Edit] Insecuriosity asked about alpha abilities and Chaoswolf12 asked first about the priesthood of Mortilus and about Adaptus. Still happy to answer questions from anyone, but please use those two threads.


	12. Festival of Adaptus part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The skeezy Lockdown-muse and his unhealthy obsession with Prowl have been borrowed (with permission) from Rizobact’s fic Winner Take All. Except in mine Prowl and Jazz haven’t met yet, and Adaptus had something to say about him perverting a religious ritual for his own ends the way he has… but mostly smooshing him between Sunstorm and Mirage and their respective needs to prove themselves to gods and lovers is a form of therapy for me. Because Riz is a tease.

The more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt. It just didn’t really make sense. Prime, Sunstorm and himself were all here. Everything Mirage had ever claimed to care about was here, he should be here too. And he _always_ went to the Festival. It didn’t make sense that there might be something more important than this. If nothing else, it was the _Prime_.

He respected Mirage’s decisions, but up until they’d arrived at the Prime’s viewing box and Mirage still hadn’t made an appearance he’d thought that maybe the noble had asked Prime to be the one to invite them so they couldn’t refuse like they had last time. But the time until the races was to start was slowly ticking away and Mirage didn’t come, announcing that whatever errand he’d had this morning had finished early and Hound was simultaneously growing worried and curious.

Where was Mirage?

Finally he had to ask. “Prime,” he winced when the large mech looked up from the note card he’d been trying to memorize. He forged on though. “Where’s Mirage? Why isn’t he here with” — _us_ — “you?”

Prime just looked at them seriously. Trailbreaker leaned over from his seat to listen, practically vibrating with eagerness to pounce on whatever character flaw of Mirage’s Prime’s answer revealed. Finally Prime nodded. “I suppose I’ve managed to stall long enough. He’s right over there,” he gestured down to where the racers were beginning to gather.

Trailbreaker’s field flared with shock, for once unable to actually _say_ anything.

.

.

Mirage could just barely see Hound from where he was standing, and waved when the green mech practically tried flinging himself from the window when Optimus finally caved and broke the news. Honestly he’d held out longer than he’d thought the giant, romantic softspark could.

Spark feeling light now that Hound was watching and at the same time twisting in fear that he’d see him fail, he turned from the Prime’s viewing box to examine his competition. This vorn's Race attracted mostly light and fast frametypes, many military but also a number of racing frames and others. A good mix. Adaptus would be pleased.

“Adaptus,” Sunstorm said, walking up and Mirage greeted him with a fond mingling of EM fields, “was a good choice. A good vorn to start a revolution. It’s a good omen.”

“Does that mean you’ll concede?” He didn’t actually believe the seeker would, and sure enough those wings came up in amusement. 

“And what would that prove to Adaptus or your love?”

“Not a Primus-damned thing,” Mirage agreed, even as threat assessment, hard learned from Valkyrie’s sometimes harsh teaching, categorized the seeker as one of his primary obstacles. He’d not won a Race of Adaptus yet, but Mirage knew of no other who had the mental and physical flexibility to enter and survive all the contests and do as well as he had, winning three different ones. And despite that, his spark felt even lighter. He and Sunstorm were actually having a conversation that wasn’t just a prelude to ravishing each other. He felt like _Mirage_ , which was both more and less than the Herald Sunstorm saw him as. “Blessings to you, Sunstorm,” he said fondly. Whatever else happened, the seeker deserved his faith.

“Blessings, Mirage. May Adaptus favor you this orn.” He started to move off, then stopped, looking past Mirage’s shoulder tire. “The Races are a series of tests,” he said absently, and like he often was, no longer focused on the same reality they all inhabited. “No matter the stakes for you or for all of us, the gods do not interfere unless you pass them, but some tests are less obvious than others,” and he nodded to what he was seeing-not-seeing.

Mirage looked and saw immediately what Sunstorm had to be referring to. One of the racers was, like most of them, standing with his cohort as they waited to be called to the starting line. Except one of them, stoic as he tried to be, was exhausted and injured enough that how little he wanted to be there showed through.

“If you don’t, I will,” Sunstorm murmured. 

He didn’t answer; he just slipped stealthily into the crowd of racers.

He didn’t go invisible, but he moved unremarked if not unnoticed. Conversations chattered around him. He submitted to one final subspace scan from an official and politely greeted a priest who traced Adaptus’ blessing on his two shoulder tires and carefully he made his way to the trio, who didn’t even notice him. The green racer was obviously military — serious military, a shocktrooper or similar — while the two black and whites were Enforcer subcaste, one probably the clone of the other (or both clones of a third mech who wasn’t present) they were so similar in frametype.

Silently he listened to the conversation, and what he heard made his spark seethe. Nothing was said _outright_ but when it came to talking around the truth, these military mechs were amateurs compared to the highest members of his own caste. Two of them — the racer and the uninjured Enforcer — were friends, and were working together to trap the other Enforcer into a bonding he, it was obvious just looking at him, didn’t want. The Race allowed the mech to refuse being Chosen, but the officials couldn’t control other pressures. It was a perversion of everything the Race was.

For a moment Mirage imagined going invisible, then putting his wrist-blade through the green mech’s spark. It was a detailed fantasy and if most of him was disgusted by such a cold-sparked act, then the part of him that had been nurtured under Valkyrie’s tutorage and the part of him whose faith had been kindled by Sunstorm’s belief in the literal truth of the gods both agreed that this mech deserved to die for abusing Adaptus’ blessing like that. Mortilus — god of death, assassins, and harsh justice — would certainly approve.

But would Adaptus?

No. _Adapt and overcome_ , was this vorn’s lesson and test, and as the two heretics turned away to examine the parts of the course they currently had access to Mirage glided forward to speak to the victim.

“What can be done?” he asked softly when he was sure his two tormentors were out of audio range.

The Enforcer’s doorwings flicked up sharply — he hadn’t noticed Mirage there either. This close he could feel the desperate hum of his EM field and it wasn’t hard to respond with concern and comfort. After a moment those doorwings drooped again. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“That wasn’t my question,” Mirage said kindly. “I asked what could be done?” The Enforcer blinked and shook his head, but it didn’t really matter because a plan was forming. “Do you have a blank data chip?” Mirage didn’t, of course, because everything not physically part of his frame had been removed prior to the race, and with a tiny flicker of hope the Enforcer handed one over. Quickly Mirage encoded his message and gave it back. This had never been done but… _Embrace change_ … he didn’t think Optimus would mind. “Take this to one of the priests. Any of them.”

Hope gave him confidence and he drew himself up, confident and authoritarian as befit one of his caste as he subspaced the chip. “Thank you.”

A message pinged Mirage’s communications as the other mech left. A large file and Mirage opened it cautiously.

Inside was detailed dossiers on all the race participants — including himself, though it was missing his training at the temple of Mortilus — and a tactical analysis of the first leg of the race, which was all the mech had been able to see from their vantage point.

The gods provide indeed!

He looked across the field and saw Sunstorm looking back, an inscrutable expression on his face and he wondered what, if anything, the seeker had seen.

He didn’t have much time to ponder. He set his attention to examining the information the Enforcer had given him. An edge was an edge, and he didn’t have a tactical processor to chew the information while he did other things and spit it back when needed; he needed to go through and absorb and analyze what he could while he had time.

Which wasn’t much time at all. He’d only finished skimming everything and tagging anything that looked important when Optimus stepped down onto the field to give his speech. All the non-racers had been cleared away in the meantime. Mirage hung back from the podium as Prime took his place, allowing the other racers to get close; he existed in the strange limbo of believing in Prime but also even more so believing in Orion and so let others who needed to bask in the gaze of a god-chosen Prime their chance. 

Optimus didn’t address the crowd. He kept his words for the racers. “All of you know why you’re here. You want to prove yourselves. To the gods, to your loves, to all of Cybertron. Just by coming here you’ve proven yourselves to me… unfortunately Adaptus is not so easily impressed.” A few of the racers, and much of the crowd laughed. “Go with my blessing.”

 _Good job Optimus_ , he thought, as the priest stepped forward to say the more formal prayers and they were herded into position at the starting line. Engines growled and turbines whined as they all jockeyed for an ideal position. EM fields crackled with excitement, the feeling ricocheting from racer to racer, creating a feedback loop that ramped up their systems and Mirage had to leash his own field, focus on modulating it as he had when he’d been younger, or else risk burning out his engine before the race even began.

“RACERS TO YOUR MARKS!” Optimus bellowed over the noise, and they — the racers and crowd both — roared wordlessly back. 

“GET SET!”

.

.

.

tbc

 


	13. Festival of Adaptus part 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not as awesome as Riz’s… but also not as long. There also ended up being some remarkable similarities despite actually having written much of this before the last *two* race segments of Winner Take All were posted. lol.
> 
> (p.s. If you haven't read Rizobact's Winner Take All, go do so RIGHT NOW. I'm serious.)

… The race did not start on the best note for Mirage.

He was happy to say he wasn’t _last_ across the starting line, but when the artillery-mech fired the signal into the sky — “GO!” bellowed Prime — he, along with the other civilians, were relatively slow to start compared to the almost startled acceleration of those military entrants.

Mirage and sixty others all threw themselves into their alt-forms and roared into, or around in the case of the flyers the nav buoys keeping them perilously close, the route to the tube-highway.

The first part of the race was down Praxus’ main highway, almost a strait shot out of the city. The rest was underground, chosen by the priests to equalize the inherent advantages and disadvantages of various frametypes. The course was twisted, branching and treacherous. Navigation buoys marked the boundaries — anything within them was free to travel over, under or through — and emergency beacons dotted the pathways.

This was not a race to be take lightly. Every time it came up, mechs died.

Fifty cars jockeyed for the best position to enter the highway from the street leading away from the stadium, and the real race began. With Prowl’s analysis of this part of the route, Mirage managed to make up a bit of distance and be among the first ten grounders to enter the highway.

Even with his split-second lag at the start, Mirage’s alt was exquisitely built for the Praxan highway. The tunnel brought them over the city’s the local streets, lights from the high towers flashing all around. With his lack of ground clearance every crack in the metal was agony at this speed, but his low profile meant he wasn’t impeded by the wind sheer in the tube. Combine that with a lightweight frame and a massive engine for his size… though not an entertainment-subcaste racer, Mirage was built to drive fast and his construction was some of the finest on Cybertron. Perhaps one of the few things he might feel inclined to thank Phantasm for these orn. He found himself copying the ten flyers of various frametypes: use this initial segment of few turns and fewer obstacles (though the flyers had to deal with the difficulty of flying dangerously close to the highway itself) to gain himself as much distance as possible while his alt mode was still an advantage.

He wasn’t that far ahead of the other fast ground cars. Three others — including the heretic, he was displeased to note — trailed only slightly behind him.

The four-car pack scattered — two accelerating, two slowing — when a midair crash sent a seeker through the tube highway and into a support pillar. One of the laggers gunned his engine and jumped the gap through the hail of glass-shards; the other had to stop. No one behind them was going to be jumping that. One accident had just cut over forty entrants off from the rest of the race.

The heretic tried shoving the purple military scout car, who snarled and shoved back. Mirage shifted gears and took off, jumping the next gentle rise and nearly crashing himself into the ceiling; when he landed with a grunt of pain the other two had given up their shoving match for pure speed.

They were coming up on the end of the highway section. Mirage hadn’t kept up with the aerial pursuit outside the tube but when weapons fire flashed — two rotary-mechs having a difference of opinion on who should enter the tunnel first — he noticed.

With a snarl he braked, almost crashing all three of them when the others chose to accelerate to avoid when the missile hit the side of the highway.

The structure crumpled around him, not so much leaving a hole like the seeker had as a network of cracks that started breaking apart. Glass splintered. Rivets twisted and screamed as they were stretched to the breaking point. Metal melted and splashed and fire buffeted him. With a curse Mirage threw himself out of alt-form and through the breaking glass. He tumbled free of the failing structure and landed on the ground with a strut-breaking _impact_.

According to his chronometer, he’d only blacked out for a second. A diagnostic revealed a dozen crumpled armor pieces, some torn wires and tubes, one hydraulic joint that had lost pressure but was already refilling, lots of scorched paint, and a surprising lack of deeply embedded shrapnel. Mortilus and Adaptus bless. He’d come through that remarkably uninjured. He’d need a medic when this was over, but he’d survive. A nav scan revealed the buoys and he was both still technically on the course _and_ only a short distance away from the tunnel entrance. His unconventional shortcut had paid off then — it would be at least two breem before the others would circle back from the designated highway exit.

He had a few inbuilt weapons — a pair of arm blades and a EMP pulse rifle — but he scooped up a largish shard of glass and subspaced it anyway as he turned away from the highway.

The ground here was rough so he stayed in primary as he did his best to jog toward the tunnel. Rubble shifted beneath his feet — one unexpected drop folding away beneath him; he barely caught himself before he fell — and he was almost cooked by the steam from a pressure valve he hadn’t noticed it decided to go off, but he made it to the tunnel without incident.

He passed the pieces of a helicopter (one of the two fighting above? Possibly, but probably not) who’d tried entering the tunnel in alt and clipped his rotor on the edge. Smoke still rose in lazy drifts, but no light flickered in what was left of the chassis. That was either a very good sign — no fires — or a bad one — no spark. Either way there was nothing he could do for him; he was still above ground so medics would already be on their way and there were no emergency beacons until they were inside the tunnel. Mirage moved on, into the dark.

.

.

Adaptus, Mirage thought, was certainly in a pissy mood for some reason. The lights flickered and he spotted the culprits just before they skittered away shedding impressive arcs of lightning. Battery Mimics. Chewed into the power conduits of the lights that had been installed for the race and drained them. He switched on his headlights and heard the mimics stop, and skitter toward, then away from him obviously attracted by the light but wary.

The tunnel was slow going. A ground frame needed to pick his way across and down. Mirage dove through a space where some mech had shot apart an enormous fan that didn’t so much block the way as threaten to crush anyone trying to pass that way. The new hole didn’t make it less dangerous, but gave him more of a margin of error. Any air-frames passing this way would have even more trouble due to that mech's interference and it was quite frankly a miracle there wasn't a pile of tattered frames there. Beyond the fan, the tunnel was a mess of dangling tubes, giant manipulator arms throwing sparks as they tried to fulfill a function that was no longer needed. It was slow going for any grounder. Wasn’t any better for a flyer. They didn’t have to climb, but any real speed and a crash wasn’t just probable but inevitable.

A monument to that very fact, the cave in had three seekers buried in it. Some of the first to enter the tunnel, they’d obviously hadn’t truly appreciated the dangers of flying full speed down here. 

He heard one of them groan in pain. He couldn’t stop and help — he wasn’t physically capable, even if he didn’t have a race to run — but he looked around and after a moment found the closest emergency beacon and hit the activation button. That would give the race search and rescue teams a place to start looking.

“Shoulda just kept going,” a voice growled out from the dark. A blaster charged and he dove for cover. Lockdown, the heretic. The green mech didn’t fire, just stalked forward, footsteps making hollow metallic sounds as he came closer. Mirage allowed himself to fade from view, and edge away from cover, perpendicular to the heretic’s path. “Gotta admit, after that missile, I didn’t expect to see you again. Thanks for making it interesti—what?”

He’d just reached Mirage’s cover and seen the noble wasn’t there. Prowl’s dossier said that Lockdown didn’t do as well when someone turned an ambush back on him. This close he could see the tell tale burns of surviving a close encounter with Sunstorm’s alpha ability and only his training kept him from giving his position away by chuckling. Though he hadn’t won, two Festivals of Mortilus were littered with opponents who’d underestimated Sunstorm’s deadly ability. _Light_ didn’t sound that dangerous until he let loose and suddenly you were facing off against the corona of a star.

He had to believe the seeker had survived the heretic. If so, then Sunstorm was somewhere ahead of him, most likely.

The mech narrowed his optics and started scanning the darkness around him, Mirage gave him that, instead of dwelling on how impossible this all was. He didn’t give the mech the chance to search him out though. He struck, and, again because of Prowl’s info, he knew just where to strike.

The glass shard — construction grade and sharper than any metal blade — went right through military armor and shredded his T-cog and the hydraulic connections in his hip-assembly. Mirage didn’t wait for him to recover; he left the shard there and threw himself into alt form, shimmering into view as he did so, and fishtailed as he accelerated out of there. Blaster shots followed him, one scoring a nasty line across his fender, another blowing out a tire. His undercarriage shrieked and sparked as he rode the rim away.

.

.

The tunnel curved back toward the city. 

Sunstorm was still out there somewhere; the relief when he’d first seen him had been immeasurable. Mirage hadn’t passed any mangled remains that could be the yellow and orange seeker since then, and every once in a while he saw light — sunlight — flicker down one of the side paths, the roar of his engines echoing around the tunnels. Despite their differing modes of travel, they were probably going nearly the same speed as they made their way through the treacherous paths.

Mirage had only killed one Battery Mimic. Given that he could occasionally see Sunstorm’s light to the side, he guessed the majority were making the seeker’s life difficult, which was fine with him.

The tunnel opened up into a vast energon processing tank, raw energon still flowing through from the pipes, collecting at the bottom half of the cavern, then draining away. He searched out the pathways he could take across — swing on that cable, land on that pipe, keep his balance as he crawled across it to that ledge, hug the wall until he reached that gap and then make a jump for the platform on the other side — but with Sunstorm right behind him it would take far too long.

Weapons’ fire and a snarling seeker engine had Mirage pressing against the wall, invisible. 

A Battery Mimic squealed, arcing lightning into a power conduit, causing the offline lights to flicker slightly, and then falling down into the liquid energon with a puff of blue smoke. Sunstorm followed, more cautiously, stopping less than seven inches from Mirage.

While the seeker paused, plotting his own route through the tangle of cables and pipes that stretched across the pool, a plan formed in Mirage’s mind.

Heel-thrusters fired, plating shifted and the jet hung there for a timeless moment, light flickering over his form and fire coming from his thrusters. A vision of beauty and perfection to Mirage’s optics that he would have liked to bask in. Instead he lunged just as the jet leapt forward. Fingers dug into a seam and the acceleration nearly ripped them from their sockets before he fully got his grip and wrapped himself around the jet.

Sunstorm screeched in surprise skittering forward and momentarily tangled with several wires that spanned the pool. Light flared bright enough to burn and more of Mirage’s plating bubbled and melted where they touched, but he was spared the brunt of the assault by his own alpha ability, the light bending _around_ his invisible form.

Then they were across, their less than controlled flight crashing them into the far wall.

Working by touch (since his optics were _just_ starting to melt from the radioactive assault), Mirage found an access port and _snicked_ a data cable home. He wouldn’t try this on anyone else, but he still had Sunstorm’s passwords from before Optimus became Prime and — _I apologize for this_ — _Still so beautiful, Herald_ — he sent the seeker into medical stasis. The burning light cut out abruptly. Four breem of unconsciousness. According to Mirage’s navigation, the race would be over one way or another by then.

Blinking in the darkness, and realizing his optics probably weren’t going to fully recover on their own, he looked around for a place to hide the seeker. He didn’t want anything to happen to Sunstorm and there was no way to know if there was anyone behind them who’d take the chance to finish off a helpless opponent. He couldn’t move him far. Sunstorm was much heavier than him, especially in alt. He settled for blasting the cover off an air vent with Sunstorm’s own weapon and shoving the jet inside. 

His diagnostic didn’t agree, but none of his injuries were fatal so Mirage turned away and made his way further down the tunnel. The beginning of the climb back to the surface should be near.

He hit the nearest emergency beacon for Sunstorm just in case as he limped his way past.

.

.

.

tbc

 


	14. Festival of Adaptus Part 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So *originally* this was going to start with Mirage Choosing Hound and then commence with the sexytimes, but alas, my Adaptus and Mortilus muses (and why in the Pit do I even have Adaptus and Mortilus muses?) decided to do something different and sexytimes were foiled again.

Mirage climbed. Exhaustion pulled him down. Pain sapped what little strength he had left. His diagnostics refused to clear the alerts from his injuries from his HUD, insisting that the damage he had taken was beyond his capacity to cope with. He needed a medic.

He needed to continue climbing.

It was thoughts of Sunstorm, as much as those of Hound that kept him conscious and continuing upward on the rusty ladder his navigation said went all the way to the top. Hound, who he loved with all his spark, would not be disappointed in Mirage for succumbing to his injuries, as long as he survived. Simply by entering the race, he’d proven himself to Hound; the gardener would not demand Mirage die to prove himself. And if rank and caste continued to be an issue, he’d try again and again and again until between the three of them — Mirage, Hound and Optimus — the obstacles had been ground to dust.

But what about Sunstorm? How would his faith be tested if he woke up to find he’d won, not because he was favored but because Mirage had proven unworthy?

Or worse, if the heretic hadn’t given up after Mirage took out his ability to transform and a good portion of his root-mode agility along with it?

Mirage climbed.

When the ladder gave out, crumbling beneath his weight, sheering away from the wall and falling away into the depths, he couldn’t even panic. Sheer desperate _reaction_ had him jamming his arm-blade into the metal wall almost before the hidden weapon had finished unfolding from the metal and circuitry of his arm.

No longer plummeting, his situation wasn’t much better. The blade was stuck good. Gravity as well as desperate strength had driven it deep into the wall. It wasn’t going to come out, not with what little was left of Mirage’s strength behind a pull, but it was also already starting to give under the strain of supporting his whole weight. Agony blared across his HUD as the blade bent even slightly. All he could think was that his stubbornness had gotten him killed. He should have given up at the base of the climb.

He closed his optics and let out a vent. He’d tried. He’d given everything in the attempt. At least Hound would know just how much Mirage had loved him. Silently he offered a prayer to Primus Life Crafter, and Mortilus Death Bringer. It had been a good life.

“So that’s it?” Someone asked from above him and Mirage opened his optics. The damage to the lenses made it difficult to focus in the dark, but eventually the speaker resolved into a blackish-purple warframed mech with gold shoulder and wrist spikes kneeling on a nearby ledge above him and looking down. “Adaptus throws a tantrum because you’re one of mine and not one of his and you’re just going to give up?”

“Not…giving up,” Mirage corrected, pain and effort making his voice static. The blade creaked as the metal started tearing and it was all he could do not to howl in unbearable pain. “Dying.”

“I can see that,” said the mech. “And I’m the one who’s going to have to go to my Creator and say I’m sorry but the world he wants will only be crafted in the aftermath of war because of it. Not something I mind, really — Patron of War, after all — but we’d promised Him that it’d be different this time. You are such a disappointment.”

Somewhere Mirage found the strength to snarl, “Take your disappointment and _shove_ it.” Some part of him, the part that knew who this mech was, also knew he shouldn’t be angry at him. He was just here doing his job. Mirage didn’t have the right to be angry with him. The vast majority of him though was just angry at this mech’s presumption and mocking tone. He reminded him too much of Phantasm, and that made his circuits crawl with indignation and rage. “I don’t give a flying frag about you!”

Far from being offended though, the dark mech was only amused. “Good. You really shouldn’t. There’s only two people in existence you should care about right now: yourself and…”

“Hound…” Mirage whispered, finishing the sentence.

Hound was watching the cameras right now. Hound was watching him give up. 

No. Never. He might die, but he wasn’t _ever_ going to surrender.

“That’s the spirit! A noble becoming a warrior. Spark of _my_ spark or not, Adaptus should be proud.” The mech looked down with those burning gold optics, deep and unfathomable as the void. Judging him. “Here… let me help you up…” and he reached down, offering one glossy black hand for Mirage to grab. He reached for it…

…and with a pained cry, he snapped the blade off the other arm as he hauled himself onto the ledge. He clung there for a moment, dizzy with survival. Then he looked up again, taking stock of the rest of the climb. Without the ladder, it was going to be more difficult, but he wasn’t going to give up now. He _was_ going to finish. Already the strange mech was fading from his memory. Unimportant.

He had a long climb still ahead.

.

.

When Mirage opened the maintenance hatch and crawled out, blinking stupidly at the sudden light, it was all Optimus could do to keep Hound from flinging himself from the viewing box and to his lover’s side. He still had to make it to the finish line and where in previous vorn this last stretch had been a fierce competition, alt-mode against alt-mode, between whoever was still there, this vorn it was just Mirage, too injured to transform, limping to the finish line.

Hound had been a tense knot of wires and tubing since the starting shot had been fired, and each injury great and small Mirage had taken had just wound him in tighter and tighter coils. When the ladder had given way, hitting the camera and cutting the feed, he’d fought as best a boxy gardener could to dive down there and see if Mirage had survived. Medics had been dispatched, but there was no word. Nothing at all to say if the noble was alive or dead, until he’d crawled his way out of the depths of Cybertron only a dozen car-lengths from victory.

Optimus kept his hand on Hound’s shoulder as they made their way down to the stadium floor. With a pat, and a strict instruction to “Stay” the Prime left him on the side lines and walked forward too meet Mirage at the finish line. To Hound’s audios the crowd was silent, holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen. So was he.

After an eternity of charged silence, Mirage took that last step across the line. He touched the ribbon and stopped, seemingly confused by it’s presence. Optimus gave a low chuckle and reached out to break the ribbon for him. “Congratulations Mirage.”

Mirage looked up at the big mech for a moment, just as confused by his existence as he had been by the ribbon, then he shook his head and stepped around the Prime, trudging forward again. Listless and determined and unable to even focus his optics.

Watching, Hound couldn’t help it. He called out, “Mirage?”

Yellow optics focused, for the first time, dimly on the green mech and he changed direction, stumbling forward and nearly collapsing into arms hastily put out to catch him. “Hound…” he sighed. “Hound, I choose…I love…” 

His systems finally cycling down into emergency stasis, he went limp. Medics rushed forward and it was with reluctance that he gave up his hold on his Intended to get medical treatment.

Shellshocked himself, he stood unable to move until he and Prime were the only ones left on the stadium floor again. 

“Hound?” Optimus looked kind, but expectant.

“Yes,” he whispered. “When he wakes up, tell him I said yes.”

The word echoed around Cybertron, and the crowd cheered.

.

.

.

tbc

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I were planning a sequel, I’d say this were the End, but since I’m *not* writing a 300 chapter political drama for this ‘verse, there’ll be an epilogue posted on Friday. See you there!


	15. Epilogue: The Festival of Primus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it was only fourteen chapters longer than I’d originally intended it to be, but here we are…

_And when you do, it will be the first pebble of an avalanche, the first raindrop of a hurricane_ …

In hindsight, that had been a good description of that festival. Mirage’s division from his caste was complete. There was no acceptance from that quarter. There was no going back. His words and influence couldn’t be entirely discarded — those came from his relationship with the Prime — but he wasn’t one of them any more and they weren’t going to pretend otherwise. 

Mirage was through pretending too. Something in him had changed during the Race. He may have been shaped and molded by the centuries before, by Sunstorm, rebelling against Phantasm and paying the price, by standing by the Prime’s side and falling in love. By training with Valkyrie and by making a choice… But the race had been the final stroke. He’d held his own life, his own fate in his hands, and decided the fates of others. He’d maimed another bot…He’d _killed_ (a mere battery mimic, true, but still a living spark) and there was no stepping back from that and returning to being just another noble, however rebellious.

He spent his time at Prime’s side, threat assessment evaluating everything and everyone, instead of socializing on his own. 

The next century was the tense calm before the storm broke. 

Clouds gathered in the form of resentment. The scent of acid came on the wind in the rumors of loyalties being quietly tested and turned. This Prime and his chosen advisors were a poison to their carefully nurtured power and preparations were made.

 _…The first light of a new dawn, and you are its herald_.

In contrast, Mirage and Hound and Prime could not be more loved by the people of Cybertron. A noble had lowered himself to race for a laborer’s affections and won, at great injury to himself. The story was told and retold again and again and was slowly taking on the cadence of holy scripture, though had not yet been penned as such, thank Primus. The race of Primus was a joyous celebration.

Both sides of it built, gaining momentum, until the Festival of Mortilus, where the gladiator Megatron finally cast down his last opponent and declared for all of Cybertron to hear that he wished to claim the Prime himself! Optimus had been nearly paralyzed with shock. He’d had a stupid newspark crush on the gladiator forever and Mirage and Hound had finally had to shove him forward to accept. They’d made a spectacle of themselves to shame any public claiming in living memory. The bonding, however, had been private. And _that_ story penned as scripture within a vorn.

Optimus had been very pleased to find his new bondmate was as much a poet and writer as he was a gladiator. Megatron had ideas and ideals and Optimus was eager to listen, debate and eventually begin to implement some of them. Their first joint Primal Decree was intended to address the issue of illiteracy among laborers and other castes that did not require it to function. It wasn’t even a _law_ , just an attempt to make learning more accessible. It was a small gesture, but enough to provoke a response from their enemies.

The first bolt of lightning struck not long after. The first assassin was sent to kill the Prime and his new bonded before even a vorn had passed. Dagger had been prepared to neutralize Megatron — had in fact been commanded to kill them both — but had not been prepared for the Prime himself to fight back, or for Mirage to be there, the three of them discussing just how literate was a reasonable goal. Or for the noble to be just as capable of maiming another bot to protect the Prime as he had been during the Race.

Prowl, whom Prime had brought back to Iacon to get him away from Barricade and Lockdown and others in Praxus while that situation was dealt with, proved invaluable in investigating, hunting down, and arresting those responsible. Mirage had been called on to defend his Prime three more times, and to assist in breaking into fortified manors on a near dozen occasions, before Prowl was satisfied he’d found them all and chained them before the altars of Mortilus for trial and judgement.

That Senator Proteus and Baron Phantasm and many members of the noble caste had been taken didn’t surprise him, but the corruption went deeper. There were scientists and military generals… there were _clones_ created only recently in an attempt to breed an army to oppose the one that was proving too-loyal to Prime. Worst of all, in the deepest recesses of the manors, there was evidence that they had been using the dark magic of shadowplay to steal the loyalties of key personnel throughout the military. Fortunately they also kept records of their victims, and the unfortunate sparks were also taken before the altars for trial and judgement.

The Functionalists had depended on the manipulation of the current system, on the actions and inactions of a sympathetic Prime, for so long that someone had acted, sent an assassin, before the infrastructure of a rebellion could be crafted and thus robbed them of the time they’d needed to prepare before they could tear down the Prime’s rule and instill their own.

Even with no war ever declared, even with many of the shadowplay victims being acquitted and sent to the Temples of Primus and to medics to have their minds and programming healed, Mortilus’ altars had been bathed in enough energon to slake even the death-god’s thirst. A forest of empty spark chambers, impaled on spears of different metals to represent their crimes, appeared at the entries of the temples the God of Judgement. Grisly, stark and vicious, they rusted there under the care of the priesthood. Iron for murder. Magnetite for heresy. Platinum for the practice of dark magic.

Iridium for attempted deicide.

The spears would stand long after the spark chambers rusted away in the acid rain. Already some were doing so, becoming as nameless here on the mortal coil as they were in the Well and leaving behind only the marker of their crimes.

What followed was the greatest reorganization of the castes since the days of Prima and the First Forged. Because of Megatron and their discussions, Optimus did not simply wish to spark replacements from Vector Sigma; he wanted to fill out the vacancies from the ranks of living mechs, if possible. The temples helped, priests either stepping in to temporarily take on a job left vacant, or they knew someone — someone in another caste — who would be a perfect replacement. Then with _those_ jobs left open, others who were qualified were moved and then replacements for _those_ were what Prime took before Vector Sigma when it came time to pray for new sparks.

When, for the first time in living memory, all the asked-for sparks were enframed, that day had practically been declared a holy day and Cybertron celebrated.

Optimus and Megatron were still arguing over the specifics, but they agreed that an option for people to change their caste should be implemented as part of the vornly census taken before the Prime’s pilgrimage to Vector Sigma. The tests had been put together and were restricted to only applying for jobs that were open or became open when its holder changed caste and every vorn the system was redesigned to address some flaw in the way it worked. It was difficult to adjust to, but Prime, his consort and the mostly-new senators and council members all admitted and agreed that they were making something by trial and error and it might be a very long time before it was set into permanent law.

Having given up his — Phantasm’s — position to a bright, newly sparked archivist to whom Vector Sigma had given the name _Lex_ and who’d chosen the name Dharma, Mirage had stayed with the nobility only reluctantly. Something had changed in him during the Race of Adaptus. As completely as he’d been rejected by his caste after, it had only been a manifestation of what he already knew. The gods had changed him and he wasn’t a noble, not in his spark, any longer. He’d intended to retest for the military, but Optimus had convinced him not to, and instead he’d taken on Mortilus’ coat of arms as the Prime’s spymaster, a position that had lain empty since before Sentinel’s rule. 

 _This is not a thing to fear_.

By the Race of Adaptus, Optimus and Megatron were bickering over the future of cloning in the military, as many of the mechs most eager to change caste had been the military clones.

To Mirage’s surprise, Sunstorm hadn’t been one of them. He’d expected the seeker to take the first chance he was offered to become a priest, but he stayed with the military. When the next race came around, they talked again — as equals — and he’d understood why: he’d always said that his spark belonged to the _Guiding Hand_ , not to any one of the gods, and priests didn’t race.

And when Sunstorm won… an entirely reflexive anticipation had thrummed through every wire. The seeker had flown over to them and looked him over and Mirage had quivered in a thick mix of excitement at being chosen again and resignation that he’d have to refuse. But instead of the ritual request to know if he’d proven himself worthy, Sunstorm had only looked at him and Hound both and said, “Congratulations on your bonding, Herald,” and then flitted over to the attending priest. 

Excitement had crashed to confusion and resignation, but it hadn’t been Mirage’s half of their spark that broke. 

He and Hound… they were spark of each other’s spark, so closely bonded that sometimes it was difficult to truly be separate. Everything that had happened had only driven them closer. Two sparks, pulsed as one. And it was together that they’d made a decision.

_“You certain you want to do this? You’re not jealous?”_

Sparks and bonds had more configurations than just a pair. Trines were also very common, even standard in some places, and quintets weren’t uncommon. However, if a bonded couple wanted to compete for the attention of a third, they had to do it in the Race of Primus. It was the only one of the Races where the synchronization of minds and bodies that came with the bonding of sparks was not so much an advantage as to disqualify them from entering.

_“I wasn’t ever jealous. Perhaps I should have been. I just didn’t understand what you could see in me, when you had him, but… it wasn’t about lust or even love. He is your faith, your connection to the gods. Besides, it’s a little late to reconsider now, lover.”_

To keep them from assisting each other, Mirage-and-Hound were assigned two lanes on the opposite edges of the track. Together they stretched their tensile cables and loosened up their hydraulics in preparation for the race ahead. A footrace, no alternate forms, no elaborate puzzles, no need to be able to fly or swim… Primus’ was the fairest Race of them all. Everyone competed on equal footing in the optics of their Creator.

 _“You know I wouldn’t hold you to this if you were uncomfortable_. _I made my choice and I can’t ever regret it.”_

One fate, one destiny… one _spark_ , they moved together to their starting positions. The priest said the blessings. The excitement was thick, EM fields layering it into air. 

_“You made a choice, and I didn’t, couldn’t, know at the time what that choice meant. I do now. I want us to do this.”_

_“He won’t ever bond with us.”_

“RACERS TO YOUR MARKS!” Prime bellowed with all the power a mech of his bulk could produce. This was, Mirage-and-Hound knew, one of Optimus’ favorite duties of his station. Megatron, his own bondmate, stood by his side.

_“One fate. One destiny…Given everything that’s happened, a spark bond is just a formality. If he’s only ours when the gods say he is, one night at a time, so be it.”_

“GET SET!”

 _“We can wait,”_ they thought together, _“We’ll prove ourselves worthy of him, that we want him here with us and then we’ll wait forever.”_

“GO!”

.

.

.

_Glory, glory, hallelujah_

_His truth is marching on!_

          — Julia Ward Howe, _“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”_

_._

_._

End

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …and now that I’m here, I feel somewhat reluctant to give this ‘verse up. I’m still not going to write a 300 chapter sequel, but I’m going to try something I’ve never attempted before (and I really hope I don’t regret it): I’m taking requests. 
> 
> That’s right. I’m taking requests for short stories in this ‘verse.
> 
> With a few caveats:
> 
> 1) I’m not offering any guarantees on how long a requested fic will be, or even if I’ll be able to do your request at all. I will consider each of them very seriously, but my inspiration is usually pretty erratic.  
> 2) No requests for anything involving a character that hasn’t been explicitly named in a fic in this ‘verse. Also in that vein, no requests for a pairing (or threesome or moresome) that hasn’t been mentioned in this ‘verse (except ProwlxJazz b/c I’ve already stated in comments that that one’s a thing). Oh! And nothing directly about Lockdown. I was only borrowing his muse, and have given him back to his proper owner.  
> 3) Please don’t ask for details on Megatron winning the Festival of Mortilus, the assassination attempt on Prime, or specifically for any of the trials/executions. If they come up while filling another request, I’ll write them, but right now I can’t think of a way to make a story about those that isn’t the 300 chapter one I’m not doing.  
> 4) No pure smut requests. I don’t write smut very easily and I don’t porn just for the hell of it. If it comes up, I will try and include it, but please don’t ask just for that.


End file.
